The Banff Centre, Photo by Sally Lee
According
to performance theorist Peggy Phelan: “Performance’s only life is in the
present. Performance cannot be
saved, recorded, documented… Performance’s being… becomes itself through
disappearance”[1]. Jose Muñoz offers an alternative to
considering performance in terms of loss. He uses the term “surplus value” to
describe that thing in the aesthetic “that exceeds the functionalism of
capitalist flows....enacting a ‘preappearance’ in the world of another mode of
being that is not yet here”[2]. This tension between ‘disappearance’
and ‘preappearance’ is a productive space in which I locate the work of
documenting performances by le/the SensoriuM. While it is impossible to recuperate the event, through
translation it can live in many forms, each telling a different truth about
what happened and how it all played out.
In
May 2012, I participated in an artist residency at the Banff Centre to create a
limited edition handmade artist book, as a means of documenting the first year
of this project. Because le/the
SensoriuM engages participants primarily through sensory-affective registers,
it was important that the book be very tactile and appeal to all the senses. I chose printmaking because of its
handmade qualities and sensuous textures.
The completed artist book will also include an audio component on an
accompanying disc. My challenge in
the production of documentation for this work involves re-framing and
translating the live performance.
I have drawn on theorist Jane Bennett’s notion of a ‘political ecology
of things,’ to highlight what she calls ‘vital materiality’, as opposed to dull
matter, as a means of transmitting the sensuous qualities of the live
performance. In addition to the artist
book, I have produced three series of prints based on Jon Cohrs’ Artificial
World Tour, presented by le/the SensoriuM in February 2012.
Silkscreen
printing involves a process of spreading ink over a fabric mesh screen
(stretched over a frame), to create an image on a sheet of paper placed below
it, made of tiny dots. The images
you see here were made by first creating a photographic collage, then isolating
each colour channel (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) and printing each as a
grayscale image onto acetate.
Using an exposure unit, these images were then transferred onto a screen
coated with light sensitive emulsion.
Ink passes through white areas of the image, while black areas block the
ink. Three and four colour
separation silkscreens with this amount of detail are laborious, requiring
great mental and physical strain and, some might say, a certain kind of
crazy. The body faces the
impossible challenge of meeting what the digital printer has already attained. Why take up this futile contest to
become the human printer? Evidently, the errors and limitations of the human
body maintain some degree of preciousness in this digital age. If monetary value be the guide, it
seems a careful balance of consistency and flaw is what we most prize. Just enough precision to demonstrate
mastery, and just enough error to betray the hand.
“What
is a work? Of what elements is it composed?...
How can
one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death?”
- What
is an Author?, Michel Foucault
“We
can only have a very inadequate knowledge of
the duration of our body.
We can only have a very inadequate knowledge of the
duration of particular things external to ourselves...
the duration of our body.
We can only have a very inadequate knowledge of the
duration of particular things external to ourselves...
Every particular thing, like the human body, must be
conditioned by another particular thing to exist and operate in a fixed and definite relation; this other particular thing must likewise be conditioned by a third, and so on to infinity. From this common property of particular things, we have only a very inadequate knowledge of the duration of our body; we must draw a similar conclusion with regard to the duration of particular things, namely, that we can only have a very inadequate knowledge of the duration thereof.
Hence it follows that all particular things are contingent and perishable. For we can have no adequate knowledge of their duration and this is what we must understand by the contingency and perishableness of things.”
conditioned by another particular thing to exist and operate in a fixed and definite relation; this other particular thing must likewise be conditioned by a third, and so on to infinity. From this common property of particular things, we have only a very inadequate knowledge of the duration of our body; we must draw a similar conclusion with regard to the duration of particular things, namely, that we can only have a very inadequate knowledge of the duration thereof.
Hence it follows that all particular things are contingent and perishable. For we can have no adequate knowledge of their duration and this is what we must understand by the contingency and perishableness of things.”
- Baruch
Spinoza, Ethics, Part II
