Performance and its ‘Inappropriate Objects’: Rory Macbeth's sculptures as performative mis-taking

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Notes

¹See http://www.collectingliveart.com.

²Although in this essay I am mainly concerned with strategies aiming to unsettle certain documentary claims of photography in relation to performance and live art, I am aware that Rory Macbeth's sculptures work particularly well with a certain set of performances and their photographic records: i.e., those performances that have already been canonized from the generation of 1960s and 1970s artists.

³I am going to limit myself to a discussion of ‘Heroes and Heroines of Performance Art’. Rory Macbeth's output, though, is considerable and consistently unsettles the boundaries between real and represented, playfully investigating knowledge as belief, truth as fragile performance. He is also the founder and director of Pilot, a non-profit platform for unrepresented artists. A brief introduction to his works may be found in Pilot (2007).

⁴ ‘Le saut dans le vide’ can in fact be called a photograph without a performance, or a photograph anterior to a performance (Schneider 2005). The fact that it is often included in the pictorial records of performance art blurs the boundaries between the two, which only strengthens Rory's choice. For a nonnaturalized reading of ‘Interior Scroll’'s photograph that refuses to subscribe to the fullness either of the live body or of the image, see Jones (1997). To Macbeth's series a fourth statuette has recently been added, commissioned to commemorate a performance by the Spanish artist La Ribot – one of her ‘Distinguished Pieces’. For the first time a collector has activated the production of a performance's memorial.

⁵‘Photography has an intimate history with performance, providing a mode of documentation that can appear to authenticate, and ultimately stand in for, the initial action’ (Grant 2002: 34). On the repressed authorial role of the photographers, see Maude-Roxby (2007).

⁶All quotes bearing no direct references to other texts come from the transcripts of the conversation I held with the artist on 1 October 2008 in his house in Leeds. My written reflections are indebted to his patience and generosity, as well as to his words.

⁷‘Minumental’ usually refers to an artwork that replicates on a miniaturized scale a betterknown one, usually an architectural building or monument.

⁸For instance, Mark Franko rephrases Phelan and takes her to task because ‘that which by definition disappears is considered to escape memory’ (Franko and Richards 2000: 8). Recent critical developments in performance studies stress the extent to which performance's temporality should not be confined to the present tense, nor to live presence. The question of the trace, the remains and the witness has certainly dominated later attempts to positively prolong performance's hidden archives (Schneider 2001). On the controversies around liveness and mediation, see Dixon (2007), especially Chapter 6, which sums up Philip Auslander's arguments against Phelan.

⁹It is true, as Barthes writes, that ‘Photography … authenticates the existence of a certain thing’, whence its ‘evidential power’ (Barthes 2000: 106–7), but it also certificates absence. On simultaneous presence and absence in photography, see Mavor (1997).