‘Marker Cones’ by (1982); image courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery, London and The Estate of Jimmy De Sana
“The biological metaphor of photography is no longer a disembodied, unmarked (white, male) machine-mediated observation. It is an extension of the body, whose signature gesture is the young woman photographing herself using her phone at arm’s length.” So wrote Nicholas Mirzoeff eloquently in Foam Magazine in 2012 – and this shift in the nature of the photographic medium is hardly manifested better than in Amalia Ulman’s Instagram performance “Excellences and Perfections” from 2014. In it the artist constructs the story of a middle-class white girl getting lost in the alluring lifestyles of California, primarily through the self-depiction in and through the gaze of social media. The camera is an ideal instrument to perform and blur fact and fiction, and not just since the invention of the selfie. Already in the 1920s, Marcel Duchamp infamously performed and worked under the drag pseudonym of Rrose Sélavy for several years, and avidly distributed images of himself in female costume shot by Man Ray. With this he destabilised notions of artistic authorship in his time (in fact, more works were accredited to Ms. Sélavy than to Duchamp in the artist(s) lifetime). What is the relationship between photography and performance, of the camera and the performing body? In “Performing for the Camera”, a new show at London’s Tate Modern curated by Simon Baker sets out to explore the vast (and weirdly, largely unexplored) space between the two concepts, both as artistic mediums that have developed in tandem over the past century, and as two interrelated ways to represent lived experience.
In the 60s, the emergence of impermanent and spontaneous performance art radically challenged the material and thus the economic value of art, and photography quickly became the only way to materialise or even retain the artworks visually.
‘Crimean Snobbism’ by Boris Mikhailov (1982); image courtesy of the artist and Sprovieri Gallery, London
‘From Window’ by Masahisa Fukase (1974); image courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery
In the 60s, the emergence of impermanent and spontaneous performance art radically challenged the material and thus the economic value of art, and photography quickly became the only way to materialise or even retain the artworks visually. Yayoi Kusama embellished naked men and women with polka-dots and protested around the city of New York – while Marta Minujin, at the end of her scholarship to study in Paris, released cages of rabbits and birds into the streets of Montparnasse, and invited her friends to set her sculptures on fire. It was, however, unsung heroes like Harry Shunk and Janos Kender that immortalised these frantic moments through images, by developing an advanced form of photographic documentation that strived to retain the subjective experiences of performance in every picture.
There are some brave curatorial choices in “Performing for the Camera” in which the thematic advancement from “Documenting Performance” to the final section “Performing Real Life” was disrupted by individual artists archives – some largely unknown or under-exhibited. One room is dedicated to the superb imagery from the photo book Kamaitachi, a collaboration between master photographer Eikoh Hosoe and Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of butoh dance in Japan. In 1969, they travelled together to a farming village in northern Japan, where Hijikata improvised a performance inspired by the legend of Kamaitachi, a weasel-like demon. In it the images, shot in costume in spontaneous interaction with the surrounding land- and cityscapes and its inhabitants, are full of energy, narrative and force, and fully elevates the photographic medium. Other archives include Nadar’s famous staging of fairy tales in his studio in 1850s Paris, or of the delicate work of Francesca Woodman, who produced a quiet but intense body of work in her parent’s house – before tragically taking her own life at the age of 22. These stories add a sense of intimacy and care to the narrative of the show: disinterested in anthological accounts, reflections on the medium are instead to be found in an obscure performance project from Japan, or in the preliminary work of a young and deeply troubled artist.
‘Marriage in Leukerbad’ by Romain Mader (2012); image courtesy of Romain Mader and ECAL
‘Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 8th July 2014)’ by Amalia Ulman (2015); image courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa
The last room, “Performing Real Life”, dedicated to the clash of performance and photography in the everyday, completes the ontological shift in the medium suggested by the exhibition. It goes from the first spark of subjectivity in what was essentially a chemical experiment – which was credited to the fathers of photography Daguerre and Talbot in 1839 – to the full internalisation of the photographic gaze in the experience of cognition – of oneself, of life, and of the very act of seeing.
“Performing for the Camera” is at the Tate Modern until 12 June 2016