7 easy pieces

Obviously this is developing into a form of debate between live art and mediated reproduction, and I don’t know why I’m being lead so far down this path but it keeps cropping up. There is a definite consciousness in my work of recording, documenting and representing. Whilst filming I undertake a conscious moment of stepping into the set time; of pressing record on camera and enacting an action usually as a means to an end. This then is projected back simultaneous to pressing record on the camera and step back into that time. Hence there is a strong relationship between the live art and mediated reproduction. A form of medial reflexivity.

Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces, performed in 2005 at the Guggenheim is interesting in the context of the cyclical recurrence of performance art. For the work Abramović repeated performances by Bruce Nauman, Vitto Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and two of her own previous works, which were largely constructed from iconographic documentation of the original. Her gesture in re-enacting these works rather than speaking of the ephemeral nature of performance work (its non-reproductive and non metaphorical nature) seems to highlight its antithesis – how performance work operates on a reliance of images (documentation) to choreograph representation. Through constructing the work from documentation they become a kind of ‘live image’ of the past, rather than a re-creation of what it was like to see the original work. Then through meticulous efforts to then record these re-enactment (by Babette Mangolte) they become images of a past event. again.