Performance_Ritual_Document

This copiously illustrated publication explores performance art-and its intensive cousin, body art-through live manifestations and reiterations in photographs, film and video. Records such as these, that began to be made early in the history of performance art, have enabled audiences to experience the works long after the artists’ original enactments and have triggered the current debate surrounding ‘remediation’ in an age of new technology. Anne Marsh’s important and clearly articulated research explores the question:‘Can performance art be successfully portrayed through documentation?’ Her text, divided into six key chapters together with introduction and conclusion, incorporates references to the local and international debates currently surrounding the art form and its place in the 21st century. Perhaps central to these is the problem of the artist’s ‘presence’ in live performance vis-a-vis the role of the surviving document and its mode of presentation in the media. Drawing on the works of significant Australian and international artists-including Jill Orr, Mike Parr, Yves Klein, Marina Abramovic, Peter Kennedy, Julie Rrap, Kevin Mortensen, Domenico de Clario, Tom Nicholson, Stelarc, Anne Graham, Ash Keating, Deborah Kelly and many more-the author investigates diverse areas of debate including the roles of relics, rituals and shamanism in the creation of performance art as well as propositions, interventions and collaborations affecting its documentation. This publication is a key work, essential to an understanding of the relationship between performance art and the various technologies that ensure its survival beyond individual events.