User:Mihail Bakalov/Trimester 1/THEMATIC SEMINAR/Notes books17.10.2013

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

Auslander notes

___________________________________

Through its trivial realism, photography creates the illusion of exact correspondence between the signifier and the signified that it appears to be the perfect instance of Barthes’s ‘message without a code" Use of the photograph as not only representationally accurate but ontologically connected to the real world allows it to be treated as a piece of the real world, then as a substitute for it.

color photographes

meria

supliment to a performance having reminder

Amelia Jones takes up the idea of the documentary photograph as a supplement to the performance to challenge the ontological priority of the live performance.

the status of the photograph as an access point to the reality of the performance

performances were staged solely to be photographed or filmed and had no meaningful prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences


coulage: The image we see thus records an event that never took place except in the photograph itself.


Does [the book] defeat its own premise when it includes the performed photography

performances dependence on documentation to attain symbolic status within the realm of culture

it will inevitably become identified with the photo the photograph ultimately replaces the reality it documents

the event is staged primarily for an immediately present audience and that the documentation is a secondary, supplementary record of an event that has its own prior integrity.


Accounci because the photographs were produced as (or perhaps by) the performance (rather than of the performance), the ontological connection between performance and document seems exceptionally tight in this case.

Acconic photographs thus are more theatrical than documentary, for it is only through his documentation that his performance exists qua performance.

the performtivety of performance it self

the act of documenting an event as a performance is what is as such

That is to say, performance rests on an assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative virtuosity. [. . .] In this sense of performance, then, the act of expression itself is framed as display: objectified, lifted out to a degree from its contextual surroundings, and opened up to interpretive and evaluative scrutiny by an audience both in terms of its intrinsic qualities and its associational resonances.

Since there was no audience for the live performance and the event was not framed as performance for whatever accidental audience may have been


characteristics of the performance, not the audiences contribution to the event, and discussions of how a particular audience perceived a particular performance at a particular time and place and what that performance meant to that audience are rare.

It is this documentation and nothing else that allows an audience to interpret and evaluate his actions as a performance.


BLINKING? IS IT A BETTER WAY TO PRODuce photos? is it a way of producing photos which have any use, ? make sence of the experiment in a global scale? seems to me its just a personal experiment!


the audiance during his walk has no real value to the performance


that would treat the Klein photograph as something other than a performance because it documents an event that never actually occurred as we see it in the image.

where documentary recordings are assumed to be straightforward capturings of real sonic events and phonography consists in the “sonic manipulation” of music to produce recordings of performances that never really happened that way.

phonography produces works of phonoart, a new category of musical entities to be considered in their own terms as art works distinct from traditional musical performances


It may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity of these pieces derives not from treating the document as an indexical access point to a past event but from perceiving the document itself as a performance that directly reflects an artistâs aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are the present audience.

__________________________________________________________________________

Archive repertoire


uses performance to intervene in the political scenarios we care about

Performances function as vital acts of transfer , transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated, or what Richard Schechner has called "twice-behaved behavior.


On another level, 'performance' also constitutes the methodological lens that enables scholars to analyze events as performance. Civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnic, and sexual identity, for example, are rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere. To understand these as performance suggests that performance also functions as an epistemology.

only in the 'live' does the act itself change

performances revealed culture's deepest, truest, and most individual character


First, the observer claims to recognize what is happening in the performance of/by the 'other


The presumption of course is that performance-now understood as drawing heavily from the visual arts and non-conventional theatrical representations, happenings, installations, body art, and performance art-- is an aesthetic practice with its roots either in surrealism, dadaism, or earlier performance traditions such as cabaret, the living newspaper, and rituals of healing and possession.


The word performance is understood differently in diff countries.

The terms proposed instead of the foreign sounding 'performance'

Olin, meaning 'movement' (mexico) motor behind everything that happens in life--the repeated movement of the sun, stars, earth, and elements

performance it emerges in the United States at a time of disciplinary shifts to engage objects of analysis that previously exceeded academic boundaries (i.e., 'the aesthetics of everyday life'), it is not, like 'theatre,' weighed down by centuries of colonial evangelical or normalizing activity.

          1. II The Archive and the Repertoire

Instead of focusing on patterns of cultural expression in terms of texts and narratives, we might think about them as 'scenarios' that do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description.


Histories were burned and re-written to suit the memorializing needs of those in power. maybe folklore is most acurate history preserved

But writing was far more dependent on embodied culture for transmission than the other way around.

Writing also allowed European imperial centers to control their colonial populations from abroad.

writting offers control


While the Church substituted its own performatic practices, the neophytes could no longer lay claims to expertise or tradition to legitimate their authority.

bones may stay the same over time, though the stories around them change over time.

The 'live' performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive
Mediations, he argues, not 'the media' provide the key to understanding social behaviors.


writing provides historical consciousness orality provides mythic consciousness


The psyche can only be imagined as a writing surface, the permanent-trace only as an act of writing.


scenarios' as meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors


Nonetheless, the irreconcilable friction between the social actors and the role allows for degrees of critical detachment and cultural agency.


action also defines place. If, as de Certeau suggests, "space is a practiced place", then there is no such thing as place, for no place is free of history and social practice.

no adequate verbal description for some expressions, not about 'translating' from an embodied expression into a linguistic one or vice versa but of recognizing the strengths and limitations of each system.


Scenarios change and adapt, but they don't seem to go away.


        1. Historicizing Performance
Memory paths and documented records might retain, These systems sustain and mutually produce each other


The 'word' encapsulates the power of the sacred and the political


The extreme reliance on performance constituted the attempts by the Mexica to forestall closure by constantly choreographing the various apparitions, correspondences, and interventions (divine and human) that kept the universe in movement. so as performance moves the universe and everything with it

There be no dances or other ceremonies that make allusion or reference to the superstitions of ancient heathenism

Anything that recalled past behaviors was to be avoided, as was anything that complicated visible categorization and control.

The many edicts against all sorts of performance practices-from the danced songs or areitos to the 'secret' gatherings-conveyed the recognition that they functioned as an episteme, "a way of thinking through movement" (Halbwach) as well a conduit for the transmission of memory.


The performance of the prohibitions seem as ubiquitous and continuous and the outlawed practices themselves. Neither disappeared.

–Multi-coded Performance

The equivocal (because multivocal) nature of religious practice led friars to suspect the truthfulness of the native's piety. Insisting on strict orthodoxy, they feared anything in indigenous practice that somehow resembled or overlapped with their own. Duran, in the Book of the Gods and Rites, draws some uneasy comparisons between the Nahua's practice of human sacrifice and Christian communion, noting "how cleverly this diabolical rite imitates that of our Holy Church"
transmitted through multiple syncretic and transcultured forms such as music, dance, the use of color, pilgrimages, the ritualized marking of place

surrogation

it allows for the collapse of vital historical links and political moves.

The performance shift and doubling, in this case, preserved rather than erased the antecedents

quotation introducing this section allows not only one deity to be worshipped under the guise of another but at the same time as another-a form of multiplication and simultaneity rather than surrogation and absenting.

Did the non-interrupted pilgrimage to her shrine signal alliance to the old or to the new?

traveling!?

transformation of the virgin(guada loupe) of mexican cities moving and renaming

oppression and reinvention which may lead to loss

How do certain scenarios encourage a 'false identification' that gets used politically (Ch 5)? How do the archive and the repertoire combine to make a political claim


_________________________________________