#8.01.

01 - Beginning
When is the art/ist present? How can a gesture become a trace? What is the truth of documents, when they have the potential to lie? The residency begins with the working title Performing the Archive, aiming to explore how performative work and interventions are transposed from the present to the past tense of the document, and how these remains may be considered as the practice itself. As work progressed text scores became the main method for negotiating these documents as they are the most problematic, paradoxical expression possible in relation to the live and its aftermath. The archive always describes an absence: those passed/past events only present through traces, ultimately depicting their own insufficiency. Here, performance is used as the means to create absence within its own archive. Further, non-performance begins to become a description for an interdisciplinary practice and methodology that describes these absences... a lack, entropy, aporia

#8.01.02 - The Score

A performance score describes an action that will/has taken place. A score is at once document and script. A recording and a possibility. It is past and future gesture, whilst art object in the present. Introduced by early Fluxus artists, text scores strip performance to its simplest possible expression - creating an art object made with the purpose of instructing and instigating further performance. However, the text acts as the work itself, read as a distinct output by the artist, with the future performances also in their name. As an art object/output, the score has never and always been. It is potential existence and relic at once. A mobius loop, circling, passing. The reader completes the circuit: they allow for the document to become actual, a proxy for performance, the imagined present. Each reader works their way through actions and scenario as performer/ observer. The live work of the performance is undertaken by the participant.

The score demonstrates intratemporality (in)action. The phenomenon of the trace along with the phenomena of ruins, remains and documents thus finds itself displaced from the historical toward the intratemporal, that which is within-time. (Ricoeur: 1990 p. 122) The score functions as the ultimate example of trace, the problematic intratemporal element. The score, (non) performance and wider archival structures all exist in this shifting, multiple state, transcending. Research undertaken at the Cha.let plays upon this dual, contradictory existence; that the score particularly embodies. The form is tested. A secondary narrative is introduced are we to take these documents/instructions at face value? Were they ever intended to be (re)performed?

#8.01.03 - Site
The scores respond to the environment. They echo in its boundaries. Locating and absurdity simultaneously become possible. As the texts can be read as relic of performance, so the Cha.let space can be read as the site of performance research. This narrative is one consciously adapted to suit the artist, the reader. Scores created during the residency are site specific, in dialogue with the space, a direct result of placing my practice within the research centre. The altered nature of site makes a witness of the artist. The score, relixcs and archive as their testimony. Site is a witness to actions. Space acts as palimpsest. These traces cannot always be read or translated. They do not necessarily indicate the nature of their witness, only the sense that something has occurred.

#8.01.04 - Non-performance in Practice

The practice that has evolved from this research is framed as non-performance. It is the absence of performance. Here it is the lack, that gap or aporia, that is the subject. The absence of performance is interpreted and viewed through its traces. A paradoxical cycle reliant on the performance and its distance in order to interrogate the archive and re-purpose it as the artwork itself. Out of a void spews endless noise describing it. Non-performance as practice explores this slippage.

#8.01.05 - Problem of the image

Early performance work (1960-70s) has been historically distorted through its highly aestheticised photographic records, with a lack of multiple recordings or witness accounts. The sparse remains enter into a mythologising of the eras work - it becomes other, viewed through the filter of the documenting image. The fewer archival materials available, the more likely a single, blurred black and white still will come to define a performance, a career, an era. If only a single image is available, it is this repeated across numerous platforms until ubiquitous and assumed as representative in discussing the work. The image (with a ccompanying mythology as art historic narrative) reaches an audience who can only ever view the archive of the work, yet read it as the work.

#8.01.06 - Ending
Text scores attempt to move from photography to a more neutral state - is this possible? The texts are coloured by the weight of performance history, read alongside all that was previous. Does the score of a work never performed represent an archive? The purest singularity of document, where the relic is the only track.
Reference Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative vol. 3, 1990, University Chicago Press.