Action/Performance and the Photograph

Half-Truth: Performance and the Photograph

The famous photograph of Yves Klein leaping into the void, taken more than three decades ago in Paris, has been the subject of much controversy and discussion. It resonates with a mysterious and disarming allure, as if something existed beyond the image itself. In observing Klein's action, there is a premonition that the truth is hidden somewhere in the spectacle-that the viewer is being given a half-truth. More than a document, it is a sign that compresses time in a way that embodies the premise of Klein's visionary art. It operates as a conceptual ideogram, a logo signifying the Void-what the artist understood as the basis for his immaterial pictorial sensibility.
Wearing a three-piece suit, Klein performed his energetic, Judo-inspired leap from the second story of a provincial building. The staging was, in fact, not for a live audience, but for a photograph that would appear in a unique tabloid, Dimanche, published on November 27, 1960. The photographer, Harry Shunk, took not one but two photographs, the first with a net beneath the soaring artist and the second from the same angle but with the street empty. Shunk then combined the two photographs in the darkroom-the upper half of one, the lower half of the other-so that the resulting image would represent Klein in a state of transcendent epiphany.

To revisit Happenings, actions, and performances by way of the photograph is a fascinating visual adventure. One soon realizes, however, that the adventure is not only visual, but also conceptual. Images used to document or represent performance art usually require additional information-a narrative text, a descriptive phrase, or perhaps a set of related images presented in a sequence or graphic order. A photograph, if intended to be read as a performance document, rarely exists without a (con)textual referent.
Since early modernism, photography's link to performance art has often been described as the "art of time." The use of photographic time in relation to performance art is not merely about sustaining a signifying moment. The concept of time-although variable in different types of performance and action-necessarily includes issues of duration, memory, narration, systems, process, sequence, temporality, tempo, and history. Photographic representation of time can be very formal, as in works by Dan Graham and David Askevold, or highly emotive, as in work by Carolee Schneemann or Lynda Benglis. Time can also be expressed in term of ideographic languages, as in the work of early William Wegman.
Yet, there has also been a certain skepticism with regard to the role of photography in the early Happenings and in other related process and performance pieces. Allan Kaprow once referred to the photograph as an insufficient datum because it never really captured the experience of the work; its signifying power was limited by the selection of the image in the frame. Robert Smithson also had reservations about the function of photography in his work, particularly in the later land art, where it was difficult to read the terrain of the piece in the context of its setting. In either case, the underlying assumptions have more to do with the role of documentation than with the component value of the work. Significantly, Kaprow later shifted his approach, deliberately posing performers and setting up situations in which the images could be read sequentially in the pages of performance manuals.
Vito Acconci also made sequential photographs in relation to his performance work from 1969 to 1970. Using a Kodak 124 Instamatic camera, Acconci investigated the phenomenology of the body by testing the limits of self-perception in relation to his immediate environment. Later he developed a more formal presentation for the work by enlarging and mounting the photographs on modular panels with accompanying hand-printed statements about each action.
The Austrian Actionists of the '60s-Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler-used photographs not only to document their scandalously orgiastic spectacles, but also register an unconscious, psychological effect. Like Klein, they were interested in staging their photographs in order to generate a sensationalized confrontation. The technique of staging-setting-up and/or selecting an image-was also used in photographs made in relation to the early performances of Chris Burden, and, more recently in many earth processes by Andy Goldsworthy.
The idea that the photograph is secondary to the original performance is not completely accurate. As this exhibit reveals, some photographs operate independently from an actual referent; that is, the performance may or may not exist, either as a physical or temporal fact, but it can always be constituted through photographic information and suddenly emerge as a conceptual action. The art is really about the process of mental reconstruction. As aesthetic desire needs an alluring agent, so we discover with Duchamp a clue to playing chess. The photograph is the half-truth that provokes an erotic counterplay, and it is always testing the limits of the game.
-Robert Morgan
© 2000 Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College

Half-Truth: Performance and the Photograph
The famous photograph of Yves Klein leaping into the void, taken more than three decades ago in Paris, has been the subject of much controversy and discussion. It resonates with a mysterious and disarming allure, as if something existed beyond the image itself. In observing Klein's action, there is a premonition that the truth is hidden somewhere in the spectacle-that the viewer is being given a half-truth. More than a document, it is a sign that compresses time in a way that embodies the premise of Klein's visionary art. It operates as a conceptual ideogram, a logo signifying the Void-what the artist understood as the basis for his immaterial pictorial sensibility. Wearing a three-piece suit, Klein performed his energetic, Judo-inspired leap from the second story of a provincial building. The staging was, in fact, not for a live audience, but for a photograph that would appear in a unique tabloid, Dimanche, published on November 27, 1960. The photographer, Harry Shunk, took not one but two photographs, the first with a net beneath the soaring artist and the second from the same angle but with the street empty. Shunk then combined the two photographs in the darkroom-the upper half of one, the lower half of the other-so that the resulting image would represent Klein in a state of transcendent epiphany.
To revisit Happenings, actions, and performances by way of the photograph is a fascinating visual adventure. One soon realizes, however, that the adventure is not only visual, but also conceptual. Images used to document or represent performance art usually require additional information-a narrative text, a descriptive phrase, or perhaps a set of related images presented in a sequence or graphic order. A photograph, if intended to be read as a performance document, rarely exists without a (con)textual referent. Since early modernism, photography's link to performance art has often been described as the "art of time." The use of photographic time in relation to performance art is not merely about sustaining a signifying moment. The concept of time-although variable in different types of performance and action-necessarily includes issues of duration, memory, narration, systems, process, sequence, temporality, tempo, and history. Photographic representation of time can be very formal, as in works by Dan Graham and David Askevold, or highly emotive, as in work by Carolee Schneemann or Lynda Benglis. Time can also be expressed in term of ideographic languages, as in the work of early William Wegman. Yet, there has also been a certain skepticism with regard to the role of photography in the early Happenings and in other related process and performance pieces. Allan Kaprow once referred to the photograph as an insufficient datum because it never really captured the experience of the work; its signifying power was limited by the selection of the image in the frame. Robert Smithson also had reservations about the function of photography in his work, particularly in the later land art, where it was difficult to read the terrain of the piece in the context of its setting. In either case, the underlying assumptions have more to do with the role of documentation than with the component value of the work. Significantly, Kaprow later shifted his approach, deliberately posing performers and setting up situations in which the images could be read sequentially in the pages of performance manuals. Vito Acconci also made sequential photographs in relation to his performance work from 1969 to 1970. Using a Kodak 124 Instamatic camera, Acconci investigated the phenomenology of the body by testing the limits of self-perception in relation to his immediate environment. Later he developed a more formal presentation for the work by enlarging and mounting the photographs on modular panels with accompanying hand-printed statements about each action. The Austrian Actionists of the '60s-Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler-used photographs not only to document their scandalously orgiastic spectacles, but also register an unconscious, psychological effect. Like Klein, they were interested in staging their photographs in order to generate a sensationalized confrontation. The technique of staging-setting-up and/or selecting an image-was also used in photographs made in relation to the early performances of Chris Burden, and, more recently in many earth processes by Andy Goldsworthy. The idea that the photograph is secondary to the original performance is not completely accurate. As this exhibit reveals, some photographs operate independently from an actual referent; that is, the performance may or may not exist, either as a physical or temporal fact, but it can always be constituted through photographic information and suddenly emerge as a conceptual action. The art is really about the process of mental reconstruction. As aesthetic desire needs an alluring agent, so we discover with Duchamp a clue to playing chess. The photograph is the half-truth that provokes an erotic counterplay, and it is always testing the limits of the game. -Robert Morgan © 2000 Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College