Book Spectators Journey
Book Spectators Journey
Book Spectators Journey
Claire Bishop writes about the economy of the spectator and the
evolution of social Art in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the
Politics of Spectatorship.1 The theory is concerned with the rela-
tionship between artist and spectator and how this relationship
evolves. I am interested to know how this relationship evolves
with time, in particular in relation to Live Art that is temporary
and not visible at all time. I will more specifically be looking at
the relationship between the action and the spectator in the Fu-
turists actions, the feminist performance art of the 1960’s to 1970’s
and the Russian art activism of the 21st century. Although the
themes and purposes of these three eras are different, I believe
that there is something inherently similar in their way of activat-
ing the audience and space.
With the feminists of the sixties, the naked body became a gener-
al symbol of freedom and not just an aesthetic attribute. To make
this argument I will compare the use of the naked body from
ancient Greece to the 1960’s, and from 1960’s to present day. When
1 Claire Bishop, ARTIFICIAL HELLS Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectator-
ship (London, New York: Verso, 2012)
5 Introduction
3 Marie-José Mondzain ,“Can Images Kill”, Critical Inquiry, trans. by Sally Shifto,
Vol 36, 1:2009
INTRODUCTION 3
FUTURE MANIFESTATIONS 51
When Performing Becomes Documentation 53
The Weight of an Image 59
Documentation as Activism 62
CONCLUTIONC 69
BIBLIOGRAPHY 75
9
What is the Deal with Live Art 10
Some artists take matters into their own hands and make new
definitions of their work: Tino Sehgal define his works as
Situations, where Erwin Wurm describes his works as One Min-
ute Sculptures and Allan Kaprow used happenings to describe his
works. While all these definitions do help us to understand the
intention of the works as well as giving us a tool to analyze the
work, they all share the same challenges when documenting, the
most obvious being Live Art’s nature of an event with a specific
duration. I will for simplicity refer to all performance art, body
art, happenings and situations as Live Art. In this thesis all art
works involving performers that have been in the contemporary
art scene, will go under this category.
11 What is the deal with Live Art
12
13
The Activist Nature of Live Art 14
Public Spaces
5 Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, Laura Wittman, Futurism: An Anthololog (London, New Haven: Yale University Press,
According to RoseLee Goldberg Live art, as we know it today,
began with the Futurist Manifesto (La Futurism, printed in La
Figaro 1909) by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti.4 The manifesto
was an attack on the established painting and literary academies;
although this was more propaganda than actual production this
became a trademark for young futurists in the coming years.
Under the umbrella of Futurism, painters would start to employ
4 RoseLee Goldberg, Live Art 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979) P. 9-14
the original ideas of speed and love of danger, and in 1910 came a
joint manifesto.5 The fact that painters, poets and sculptors were
working towards the same goal made them all equal; the paint-
ings were not just decorations on a stage, and the performances
were not just entertainment. The futurists made no separation
between art as poets, as painters or as performers. Live art is the
perfect medium for activism; it is daring and it reaches a lot of
people. Having it in a visual art context also means that you are
able to reach a different audience than had it been only an activist
action and not an artistic action.
I would claim that the use of activism and propaganda in Live Art
did not start with futurists but can be traced back to the tragedies
2009)
We know from The Republic (Plato, ca. 380 BC) that Plato com-
6 Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy - Suffering under the Sun (Oxford: OUP Oxford 2010)
that the feminist art movement made a mark in art history, with
7 Steve Rose, “Carolee Schneemann: ‘I never thought I was shocking’”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/
its female performers working to free the female body of all its
conceptions.
Clearly the Russian activist artists are a special case and their pro-
tests are very different from the protests of the 60’s and 70’s artists,
but many things can be compared. The fight for equality amongst
gender and sexuality and the protests against oppression can be
13 November 2014)
compared, but even more I would say that the methods are com-
parable. The actions often take place in the public where they
can not hide in the safe place of the art world, the places of the
activist action is often chosen as the subject of the protest.
Documentary Photograph, Fixation, Pyotr Pavlensky, 2013. Photo taken by a
person passing, published in numerous articles.
20
The activist nature of Live Art 22
Kalos Kai Agathos9 is the concept of good and beauty, where the
inside (moral) and outside (body) was equally important, to be a
complete human you had to have both qualities. Kalos Kai Agathos
was generally used to describe a man who has the virtues of an
aristocrat or a leading citizen, including good looks, intelligence,
wealth and social status. Although public shame, had you not
been good citizen, was a known concept in the ancient Greek
society, the concept of sin and shame that we know today was
invented by Christianity. The idea of shame was in the ancient
Greek society connected to communal decision rather then a re-
lationship between the individual and a god. Shame and sin were
therefore not connected to the body, which allowed for beauty,
strength and youth to be celebrated as a godly figure.
10 Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, (McPherson & Co Publishers, 1979)
p. 234-235
29 The Activist Nature of Live Art
Bronze, Discobolus, Myron, ca. 460–450 BC . The original sculpture is lost. The image show
a Roman replica from 2nd century AD.
Documentary Photograph, Interior Scroll, Carolee Schneemann, 1975
Although the view of the body, in particular the female body, has
changed several times since ancient Greece we still value youth,
strength and beauty as a possession of high value. In Allegory of the
painted Woman Blake breaks down the physical movements of por-
trayed beauty and grace, as has often been the theme in paintings
of female nudes.
Alexis Blake, Allegory of the painted Woman.
37 The Activist Nature of Live Art
11 Claire Bishop, ARTIFICIAL HELLS Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London, New York: Verso, 2012)
The spectator as part of social political structures in
Live Art.
I will be looking at the specific part of Bishop’s text where she dis-
cusses artists that tend to hire people to perform their own socio-
economic category,12 on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age,
disability or profession. In the beginning of the chapter I made
an assumption saying that because of the 60’s feminists, identity
politics have become a structural part of Live Art. I will start by
discussing the tendency of hiring non-professionals to perform
an aspect of their own identity, called live installations. Exam-
ples of this tendency is Annika Eriksson’s Copenhagen Postmen’s
Orchestra (1996) and British artist Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass (1997)
who both invited bands to perform recent pop music in their own
respective style, or Elmgreen & Dragset’s Try (1997), where they
hired, gay men to walk around in the gallery listening to head-
phones. Bishop emphasizes the fact that this work was primarily
developed in Europe and was a break with the more direct identi-
ty politics that were crucial in America.
The critique at the time was that Cattelan was not straightfor-
ward in his political message.15 Even though the performance lime-
light was shared, it was highly directed by Cattelan, using a sport
as a popular point of reference rather than a democratic focus
of collaboration. It is, in fact, not uncommon for artists making
this kind of Live Installations to use the very structures they are
criticizing. The mere structure in this specific field is vulnerable
to critique, as the whole structure is made from one person (the
artist) directing a group of people of a certain socioeconomic
category (performer). Does the artist use a group of performers
usually seen as a minority, the artist will just be pointing at a ten-
dency by reproducing it, as was the case with Cattelan’s Southern
Suppliers FC.
The group does (as have become normal in today visual language
of activism) use the internet as the public space framing the
action. The fact that the use of imagery has become an important
part of visual activism makes it possible to reach a larger audi-
ence and use the imagery depiction in art history as a focus point
of your references. What in many people’s eyes are pornographic,
are for Andersen a celebration to the female figure and strength
using the visuals that we connect with pop culture, superficial-
ity and fragility and insist that the issue is in the reader not the
subject, that beauty and strength go hand in hand. Andersen tests
our own vanity and how we look at images.
A. Photography from Ludermanifestet, Girl Squat, 2017
Girl squat can only do what they do, because of the times they are
living in. They are exactly saying that the interpretation of the
object has to be changed not the object itself. They objectify their
own bodies and insist that this does not mean that their bodies
are for sale, they still belongs to them. We need to remember
that Girl Squat is a project that at no time is defined as an artistic
project, which, however, I would suggest that it actually is. Bishop
uses ‘project’ as an indicator of the artists renewed social aware-
ness in the 1990’s, and describes a successful project as something
that allows the worker to integrate him/herself into a new project
afterwards, as a generator of new projects. The flexibility that lies
in this art form and in particular within the labor of the artist
is according to Bishop a direct consequence of withdrawal of
manual skills, resulting in long-term projects that is closer to that
of a service than visual object. It is hard to determine what is an
artwork (project) and what is a social project, so we rely on the
argument: if the artist says so.
Girl Squat has been very successful partly because of the frame
of the project and the visuals as a result of their activities. Pri-
marily using social media they use a public platform where the
visuals aren’t that much different then of so many others in the
same place. They then add other elements, like a certain text on
their t-shirt, a caption or a debate about sexual harassment. The
project is efficient when the agenda of the artist, the visuals and
the spectator clash. Why I would call Girl Squat an artistic project
with a socio political agenda, much like the feminist performance
art of the 70’s.
Photography, Nikita Klæstrup, Ekaterina Krarup Andersen and
d Louise Kjølse, Girl Squat, published in Ludermanifestet, 2017.
51
Future Manifestations 52
16 Hans Belting, Art After Modernism, trans. by Caroline Saltzwedel, Mitch Cohen and Kenneth Northcott (Chicago:
without an audience.
The secondary audience is the audience that was not there phys-
ically for the live action but has seen documentation of the work.
For most people an artwork will be seen on a different medium
then the original. Paintings, sculptures and photography’s can be
viewed long after the artist is gone, but live works do (for the most
part) only exist as a time-based medium. Duo to the amount of
information available it is fair to assume that a big percentage of
the combined audience (both first and second), will be part of
Future Manifestations 54
17 The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 85 - 95 S.T, “The fine art of human interaction”, The Economist, https://www.
the second audience category. This raises a new question: does a
performance only exists when it is on display?
audience in this case is the people who have heard stories about
Seghal’s work. They work like a mythological story where the
image you get from Tino Seghal’s work is as strong from the story
as it is in real life. I have heard people telling me about “this is so
contemporary” from so many different sources that I think I have
seen it, I have heard people singing “this is so contemporary, con-
temporary, contemporary” so many times that I think I was there
seeing the uniformed guards sing - at least that is what happens
in my head. In my mind children are dancing in the entrance as
well, I think I heard someone tell me that. I have also heard about
the same work with elderly people and children. Some scientists
believe that evolution has wired our brains for story telling after
thousands of years with storytelling as the primary information
source. When a person only have access to a work through story
telling, this work becomes mythological, they also hear it from
the viewers perspective making the first audience an active part of
the work. Seghal has a long list of demands when he sells a work;
for one, a person that Seghal has trained must install the work.
This means that when he dies, and the person he trained dies, the
55 Future Manifestations
We also have to take into account now that most of the second
audience is online, where there before were a physical photogra-
phy in a larger collection, we now have internet and computers,
most artworks will be seen as images on a screen with no prior
explanation. When Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author
argue that the text no longer belongs to the author, but to the
reader and how he/she interprets it,18 we can draw parallels to the
spectator and the artist.
If the author is the first audience then the reader is the second.
Barthes took it a bit further, saying that all writers borrow from
various experiences and knowledge that they have obtained
through other texts:
Although Barthes was talking about texts, this is a theory that can
easily be adapted to visual arts.
What I will discuss is not the origin of a work, but rather the
weight of the interpretation added by an audience. Barthes
argues that to put a author to a text is to limit possible interpre-
tations. The explanation of a text is in the readers interpretation
not the authors.,The Critics of The Death of the Author theory
claims that the author is always present and that understanding
the life and inspiration of the author will broaden the interpreta-
tion and stay ‘true’ to the intention of the author.
18 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, Image Music Text, essays select-
ed and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 142-148
19 Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, Image Music Text, p. 146
Future Manifestations 56
I would claim that once the author is gone and enough time has
passed, the interpretation will happen according the knowledge
of the current time, and not the time of its origin, making the
meaning of a work change. It can also happen that the collective
understanding of a certain situation is so strong that an inter-
pretation will always be in a certain way. Let us take Barthes
argument that most signs are only meaningful because we have
attributed meaning to them.20 We can transfer the same theory to
images; if the meaning of an image will change then the collect-
ed understanding of a work will change. When a work has been
published it does not belong to the artist anymore, because that it
is out of his/her hands to direct the reading of the work.
With Live Art this concept presents a whole new problem, when
the majority of an audience is not present for the live action; can
we even talk about the existence of the work when it is not on
display? Depending on the nature of the action, the work can
exist independently of an audience, but that does not mean that
the action cannot be viewed from the medium of photography,
story telling or something completely different. The documenta-
tion will therefore be both the result of the action, and the action
in itself.
Future Manifestations
58
59 Future Manifestations
Let us look at how a live work can manifest itself when not on dis-
play; we can have a script, a video, a scenery, a photo or a memo-
ry. Though none of these will show the original form of the work,
some will be more accurate to the atmosphere than others. Using
photography provides the obvious problem of a snapshot, where
only one specific moment will be documented. Another problem
presented here is the politics connected to the body and there-
fore live art. Performance artists mostly used this kind of docu-
mentation in the 60s and 70s. The documentation of Yves Klein’s
Anthropometry, works as an example of documentation through
a snapshot of the performance and the remains that survive after
the performance.
In the fall of 2017 a case erupted where 1000 kids under 18 have
been accused of sharing children pornography on social media,
after footage of a 15 year old girl and a boy was shared on Face-
book more then 1000 times. The interesting thing here is that
the action of the two young teenagers is not illegal but sharing
the footage is. The 1000 young teenagers have been accused
under § 235 the, who spread pornographic visual recreations of
persons under 18 years, gets punished with a fine or up to 2 years
in prison. This is a big deal because it emphasizes the differ-
ence between action and reproduction. Images only exist in the
action, but it is not the action we judge rather the reproduction.
Mondzain talks about images as an instrument of power over
bodies and minds, and about how representation of violence
sells so well and are source of great profit.23 Perhaps this is why
so many shared the violent footage, not because of a profit but
online popularity. This is of cause a very different case as differ-
ent laws are applied to the privacy of two people and to art works
which are often staged and planned. I would argue that the way
we judge and view visual context is the same. We don’t judge the
action but the object that is the visual content even if their status
I will return to the question: What difference does the fact that
the image of Burden documents something that really happened
while the image of Klein does not, make to our understanding of
these images in relation to the concept of performance
documentation?
tion.
Without knowing the artist you can assess the work without
being entrapped in the artists idea of what the work is (or was)
about. This is also in line with the dead author theory; The
documentary traces of a work can be put as high as the artists
intention. This knowledge should not be privileged over the
documentary traces. Either way there is no guarantee for the
audience to have any knowledge of the intention of the artist, or
the audience might have a deep historical, political, social and
personal context for a specific performance. What is ‘’the real’’ is
a subjective question, as it refers to the experience of the specta-
tor. If a spectator can experience a performative documentation,
as that of Sherman or Klein, then a spectator will also be able to
experience the documentation of a live action.
The Tate modern has Tate BMV live performance, where they
present live performances in an online space. Emily Roysdon
presented her work I am a Helicopter, Camera, Queen on May 31
2012 in the room next to the turbine hall, fallowed by a Q and A
where online viewers could write in questions. The only physical
present audience was the camera, the camera is not a performer
the camera controls our gaze. We the audience see everything
through the eyes of the camera, the camera is the first audience
and we the second, but this is as much a performance as anything
we would see live and it is in line with how we get most of our
information anyways. Within the problematic of how to keep the
documentation as close to the performance as possible. Here the
documentation and the view of the performance the same. But
does it then make a difference if it is seen live or after? I would say
that when viewed live, that will be the original performance and
anything viewed after that is documentation even though it is the
same footage viewed on the same platform. To argue this I will go
back to Auslander argument of the photography being treated as
a piece of the real world, rather then a substitute for it. To make
this argument Auslander quotes Helen Gilbert and her statement
the fact that the photograph as not only representationally accu-
rate but ontologically connected to the real world, is what allows
the photography to exist as an object in its own right, not only a
substitute for it.28
Documentation as activism
Although this was not an artistic process they used images to pro-
test and to tell a story. The woman were told not to laugh in pub-
lic, so they reacted by laughing on an even broader public space:
The social media. Likewise has the movement of body positivity
largely taken place on social media. From an artistic point of
view, this platform can be used as the red square was used as the
framing of Pavlensky performance’s, or that the lecture of Sch-
neemann was the frame of her performance. Social media is the
frame of the images by Ekaterina Krarup Andersen.
photograph very badly, and the images conveying very little of the
contextual information. Where the participatory art challenge
the passive spectator, that has been the tradition of art viewing.
Interior Scroll does not have the same effect now as it did because
we see it in a historical context. The images of Andersen ask for
the participation on the media they are presented on and does
therefore hold the same provocative effect as Interior Scroll did.
I would say that the success of a participatory or activist work
lies in the expectation of the spectator, when you frame a work
in a way that does not ask for any participation from the viewer
it looses its effect. This is where the question of documentation
as an activist mean becomes tricky, it is not that an image of a
performative action or what I previously have called performative
documentation can’t have an effect, as seen with Cindy Sher-
man, but the question is whether or not is it possible to view it
as anything but a historical reference. The actions live on in the
documentation when the story of the action is still alive. The
performance of Pussy Riot is still relevant, because that the conse-
quence of their actions till are relevant.
69
Conclusion 70
The activist Live Art is, as its name suggest, a form of activism
framed within an artistic practice. It is based on actions that as-
pire to make a change beyond art. To do this efficiently there need
to be a direct relation between artwork and the targeted audi-
ence. The activity will therefore often take place in a public space
where the action cannot be hidden by the ‘secure’ frame of art.
They enter the places that they are protesting. When an artist
protest the established art world, the protest belongs in the space
of fine arts. This is also why the feeling of activism in live art is
so strong, because we know that it can be used as a successful
tool of protest or activism if done in the right place: Schneemann
performed Interior Scroll during a film festival, although it was a
scheduled performance she performed something different from
what was expected, Pussy Riot staged a performance in Moscow’s
Cathedral of Christ, Pyotr Pavlensky at the red square, the futur-
ists staged their events in theaters and Girl Squat on social media.
They all perform in the space of the public they are targeting.
The tradition of activist activities in art is therefore more about
71 Conclusion
For all the Live works I have discussed I have not seen any myself,
but I have experienced them through photography, textual, oral,
video and/or film traces, which gives me the advantage of viewing
them in a historical context. This is also the exact reason why the
essence of a live work will change in time and why the
documentation will turn into a work independent of the original
action. Because of its independence the documentation can have
an activist outcome, and not only be viewed as an
historical reference.
75
Bibliography 76
RoseLee Goldberg, Live Art 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1979)
Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy - Suffering under the Sun (Oxford: OUP
Oxford 2010)
Teachers:
Jay Tan,
Frank Mandersloot
Thesis supervisor:
Alena Alexandrova