How do we document and archive performance? A live art salon

So these are documents that I found in the Tate archive at Tate Britain that relate to Vito Acconci, the American performance artist, who was kind of working in the ‘70s. I was invited to develop a research question that would relate my practice to an aspect of the Tate’s collection and I was really interested in exploring really the status of performance and live art within the Tate and how things are now kind of… you can buy performance and collect performance art and it’s preserved in different forms. But often there’s a kind of disparity between, you know, experiencing something live and then the documentation of it. I spent a couple of days at the archive at Tate Britain and I came across some material related to Vito Acconci which came through a kind of correspondence that he had with a curator called Barbara Risa. He sent kind of sort of these descriptions that are kind of like instructions or documents of performances. I think I’m really interested in this, how you can activate these documents. Within my own work, I’m interested in that idea; often I re-enact things or reperform things as a way of kind of like getting an understanding or trying to learn about stuff through experiencing it, I think, and in terms of how I was able to work with all you guys, I think that was really maybe about sharing that process so that we’d have a collective conversation about how we might explore these ideas. And it was sharing ideas, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like teachers and students all helping out Harold Offeh, from the beginning I think it was kind of like when we do our criticism, everyone’s just got an opinion and that’s how that idea developed, wasn’t it? It was really kind of a group thing. That idea of conversation and sharing ideas probably was planted quite early on. The overarching title for this whole thing was Live Art Salon. For us, if we’re talking about archives, I think you have a conversation with the work and I think there’s something about, in a way we’ve made this piece where that’s become the material, the conversation. Because performance art is ephemeral it can be documented but perhaps to experience it is the way to actually engage with it so us experiencing performance art by performing it was the entrance point. The first performance, that was quite late on and we still didn’t really know what we wanted to do, did we? And then realised it was 9th March, that turned out to be Nicky’s birthday so we started talking about the idea of having a birthday party at the Tate. We had a time period where we would talk about an object that we’d just opened and then the time period would be over and somebody would leave the table. A lot of it was talking about, with the dinner party idea, was thinking about what someone would be surprised to find in a gallery, so what could we stage, what could we insert into the space that would catch people out? Because the audience was a part of it, wasn’t it, that was one of the things we were really keen on doing because their response was equally as part of the performance as our kind of conversation in a sense. So the second performance which we discussed and took part in the tanks which was kind of the setting for a reverse birthday party but in this…I got presents for all my guests and these presents were direct responses to the gifts that I received. Because Nicky gave me parts of his collection in response to me giving him part of my collection, so I’ve made him notes… I was given a note from Nicky’s collection in return for a postcard I had given him from my collection. I wanted to give Nicky another note as a gift to perhaps further his note-making. You know, again, we kind of often think of the archive as being kind of sort of set, or documentation as being fixed but actually it’s not, it’s mutable, so this kind of, like, batting back and forth is really lovely in terms of really thinking about really how the document facilitates the conversation or an ongoing process. Perhaps in the first performance there is some kind of shared control over the conversations in which you all had some kind of control over where that conversation might go by presenting this gift. In the second performance, I felt like I had quite a bit of control because I was going to be dictating essentially every conversation in some way. I mean, maybe this is the point at which we should talk about the difference between those two because I think the second performance took place in the large tank and that was a completely different experience, wasn’t it, in terms of how it was set up. I think especially with the lights as cues and how that changed moving into the second space down in the tanks, everything felt much, much bigger and a little bit scarier and there were proper lights. Yes, there was a kind of formalisation and we had much less time for conversations. The second time it was much, much tighter, but it was also an archive as well of the previous performance. I think that’s formally, so there was a kind of projection showing images from the first performance, which is something that continues, I think, with each iteration. Do you think that goes back to some of the things you brought up right at the beginning then about that correspondence which feels then like it’s almost a set of instructions and at the beginning, yes, it’s playful and I think we said right at the beginning of this conversation something about being drawn to that particular form of performance art because of the way that their work was quite playful, and that is how this started but yes, this becomes, although we haven’t necessarily written down a set of instructions, it has become more formal. They’re not instructions like that that are just written out but we kind of had like... we’d get the gifts and then the gifts would spark the conversation and then when the alarm clock would ring or the lights would come down and we’d move on and we’d stand up. There kind of was basic instructions but only outlining kind of the way it would go. The last thing we’ve got here is a call sheet for... It says call sheet for Live Art Salon filmed 12th July 2013 so it’s the instructions for today. So is it possible to recreate a performance or is it a new performance every time? For me the performances haven’t felt... well, they’ve felt like repeat performances but not of the same performance if that makes sense? It’s been a similar experience but I don’t know whether you can ever truly recreate a performance. Not without a script, especially the way we kind of do it. This is about a group of people at a particular time with particular motivations coming together for a particular period of time and then you couldn’t re-enact Nicky’s birthday party in the Tate because that wouldn’t work again. We’ve had many discussions as we’ve gone through this process as to how does this end? Does it end? Can there be an end to what we’re doing and to these discussions and I guess does performance art end? I don’t know but this feels kind of like a really nice conclusion to what we’ve been doing and it feels like something that could potentially be archived, and as you were saying earlier that kind of idea of a cyclical performance, and it feels like the work’s done that as well, as we’ve been going through it, and I think it’s only fitting that we kind of archive the outcomes that we have produced. There’s a question to be posed, about at what point do the objects collated as part of the performance become relics?