User:Elleke Hageman/Trimester1/Thematic/Notes 4
AD maandag 28-10-13 Notes on Acts of Transfer
“Performnuts” “Performenzos”
Visual acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge and a sense of identity through re-iterated methodological lens that enables scholars to analyze events.
Performances represent everyday life. Our lives consist out of patterns of performing everyday. This may or may not be a valid representation of what a society is like.
Populations could grow to understand each other through performance (Turner).
Logocentrism – the extreme believe in words fundamental expression of external reality
Performance has a history of untranslatability
The problem is the broad range of actions it covers from dance to iterations the communication is uni -directional.
Social and cultural performances interdependancy.
Much of writing on performance is an aesthetic practicie
Performance is as much about remembering as forgetting.
replacing the name is not necessary because it does not change the meaning
II the archive and the repertoire
Performance = transmitting knowledge
Knowledge by inca's was mnemonic passed through by speech. Writing needed a specialized skill. Most knowledge is passed through via expressive means.
Archive – It is a myth that the archive does not change. Things get lost stolen etc. It is not an unchangeable thing. Also the meaning of the archive changes overtime via interpretation etc.
Individual performances dissappear. The capturing of a performance is never the performance itself.
Repertoire transmits verbal live etc. Performance wherass archive = written
The staging of scenarios placing oneself in different social contexts gives insight and creates understanding for students.
Re-thinking methodologies
Scenarios frame and activate social dramas and introduce the generative critical distance between social actor and character. Scenarios and the narrative.
III Historicizing Performance We cannot know the meanings of these performances.
Change the social framework of the rites by ordering to stop. But it is remembered by their bodies.
The performativity of performance documentation
If a performance did not really happen but there is documentation on this performance what does it do to our understanding of this performance?
2 categories in documenting performance: documentary and theatrical The documenatation consists out of things: a record of the performance of which it can be reconstructed and evidence.
Don Slater: “Through its trivial realism, photography creates the illusion of such exact correspondence between the signifier and the signi- fied that it appears to be the perfect instance of Barthes’s ‘message without a code.’ The ‘sense 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.’”
The photograph is a reminder of the external factors which create the performance (place time etc). The performance is staged solely for the purpose of being recorded. The performance only existed in the photograph. So what is then the difference between a geensceneerde foto/werk and the performance? Performed photography.
The performance is raw material for the photograph the difference is ideological. Acconci the performative in documentation itself. (high level of consiousness).
Theatrical performance the documentation of it is a very important factor of the work. Sometimes there is no audience present.
The crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance but that of the audience and the document.