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Between Action and Image: Performance as ‘Inframedium’

Jonah Westerman

20 January 2015

What would it mean to think of performance as a medium? Or rather, what would

it do to our usual modes of articulating performance art, its meanings, and its

histories? It might at first sound odd to posit performance as a medium, given

that we normally think of it as resolutely ephemeral. But thinking about

performance in relation to media has always been part of how critics and

scholars have dealt with its forms, even and especially when making the

strongest cases for its inevitable evanescence.

In 1993 Peggy Phelan wrote that ‘Performance’s only life is in the present’; that

it ‘cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the

circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes

something other than performance’. For Phelan, a work of performance art

only exists as long as the exact duration of its staging. Repeat performances

comprise entirely different works, and any documentation – any translation into

mediated forms – can only retrospectively gesture toward that which once was,

but is no more. Phelan draws this ontological line in the sand because, for her,

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the value of performance lies in its disappearance: ‘Without a copy, live

performance plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present – and

disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where

it eludes regulation and control’. Because it vanishes, performance has the

power to short-circuit the normal functioning of the art market’s profit-motive and

to escape the power of mastering narratives.

In Phelan’s account, performance’s identity and its attendant capacities are

secured through a negative relation to media. Performance is not a photograph,

not a video, not a subsequent written account, not even the aggregate of

memories stemming from the act since these, too, only represent partial

approaches to the thing itself – just rippling waves generated by, but not

identical to, the stoniness of the stone now forever submerged beneath its own

glistening traces. For her, performance is the art form that is not one, that which

exceeds the photograph, that which evades the video, and so on. Performance

is raw immediacy.

Philip Auslander has adopted a diametrically opposite view of this relationship.

For him, mediation is what creates performance in the first place. In 2006 he

wrote, ‘Documentation does not simply generate image/statements that describe

an autonomous performance and state that it occurred: it produces an event as

a performance’. That is, those formerly inadequate and obscuring ripples can

now be understood not only to describe the size, speed and trajectory of the

stone that created them, nor merely to prove and attest that there was a stone

that struck the water, but to draw our attention to the event as something

significant, something worthy of our attention because it has left its mark on the

world and our experience of it. Auslander demonstrates the might of this ex post

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Fig.1

Yves Klein

Leap into the Void 1960

© Yves Klein, ADAGP, Paris

Photo: Shunk–Kender © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

facto production by describing works that never happened in the way they are

portrayed – performances that exist solely as works of mediation.

He focuses on artist Yves Klein’s

famously confabulated photograph, Leap

into the Void 1960 (fig.1). This black-

and-white image captures Klein in full

body profile and in the middle-distance

(from the standpoint of the camera) as

he takes a swan dive from a two-story

building, frozen at the height of his arc

before the impending plummet to the

sidewalk below. When it was staged, a

group of people on the street were

waiting with a net to catch him. In the

final collaged image that circulates

as Leap into the Void, however, this

practical precaution has been carefully

excised, another view of the unforgiving

and un-peopled ground standing in for

those open arms. As Auslander puts it, ‘The image we see thus records an

event that never took place except in the photograph itself’. Even so, he

argues, Leap is no less a performance for never having happened. In

Auslander’s view, the photograph makes the performance – not only ratifying it,

but typifying it and calling it into being as an action intended for consideration by

an audience. It is the photograph that creates the performance, and continually

creates it every time someone sees the image. Here, whatever is alive in

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performance is initiated through its mediation.

Auslander confronts the ghost of Phelan’s negative ontology that haunts his

intervention by comparing Klein’s Leap to Chris Burden’s equally

iconic Shoot 1971, which also purports to present a fleeting action in

photography (fig.2). For Shoot, Burden had himself shot in the arm by a

marksman armed with a rifle. Photographs capture the tense moment before the

bullet is loosed – the shooter ready and aiming as Burden stands against a

blank white studio wall – as well as the immediate aftermath – the artist walking

across the studio, snapshot taken from his left side so the .22 caliber through-

and-through on his tricep and its telltale trickle of blood are in prominent

evidence. Polemically, Auslander asks:

What difference does the fact that the image of Chris Burden

documents something that really happened and the image of Yves

Klein does not make to our understanding of these images in relation to

the concept of performance documentation? My answer: If we are

concerned with the historical constitution of these events as

performances, it makes no difference at all. 5


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Fig.2

Chris Burden

Shoot 1971

Auslander divorces the facticity of depicted events from the reality effect

produced by their ultimate forms – it looks like Klein jumps recklessly, just as it

looks like Burden got shot. For him, that effect is the location of performance.

Auslander concludes, ‘It may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and

authenticity of these pieces derives not from treating the document as an

indexical access point to a past event but from perceiving the document itself as

a performance that directly reflects an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility and

for which we are now the present audience’. Such a thought experiment

washes away layers of accrued anxiety over coming to performance(s) too late.

But you do not have to be Peggy Phelan to see that this notion of performance

as a mediated artifact, one that ‘reflects an artist’s aesthetic project’, forfeits any

and all claims to its being different from any kind of art whatsoever. Is this not

true of all photography, film, painting, sculpture, and so on, produced since the

advent of the concepts ‘art’ and ‘artist’ (at least in terms of the western

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disciplinary language of art history)? Phelan effaces any significant connection

between performance and its traces while Auslander elides any difference

between action and artifact. The shared result of each of these attempts to

define performance is to posit it as a sovereign category, yet make it

unknowable. For Phelan, this is the stated aim – the stone is lost to the water –

but for Auslander this erasure is an unintended (and ironic) consequence – we

encounter an infinite homogeneous surface, every undulation like any other. For

all the verbiage invested, we do not know performance any better.

Surely there must be a space between these two antipodes, a terrain on which

we could sensitively draw out how performance relates to its media while

respecting distinctions. In 1965 artist Dick Higgins used the term ‘intermedium’

to describe then-new works of art that he understood ‘to fall between media’.

He was talking about Happenings, which the essay described as ‘an uncharted

land that lies between collage, music, and the theater’, but also about

Rauschenberg’s combines, Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, and goings-on at

Judson Dance, among other examples. For Higgins, this transgression of art’s

traditional lines echoed the day’s social unrest. The notion of a ‘pure medium’

could no longer hold when ‘Castro work[ed] in the cane fields’ and ‘New York’s

Mayor Lindsay walk[ed] to work during the subway strike’. With such an

equation between art’s taking flight from medium specificity and the seeming

signs of a reorganisation of society in mind, it is all the more baffling to confront

the later desire to pinpoint and protect performance’s ontology, its medium

identity, in the name of securing its radical potential. Despite his sense that the

mode of intermediality signaled an epochal shift in art production, Higgins insists

that the concept can only offer a starting point for further analysis and

understanding: ‘it allows for an ingress to a work which otherwise seems opaque

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and impenetrable, but once that ingress has been made it is no longer useful to

harp upon the intermediality of a work’. Starting from the realisation that

artworks can comprise intermedia, one must then proceed to interrogate which

media are being intermingled and why.

This idea can bring us some distance in approaching (with specificity, rather than

flattening equality) the cases Auslander raises. For example, thinking in

intermedial terms could mean conceiving Leap in relation to collage

and Shoot in relation to photojournalism. Pulling the works apart in this way

would set us on track to appreciating their differences, why it matters historically

and aesthetically that one image corresponds more closely to a factic

experience of lived reality than the other. We still run into a dead end, however,

so long as we imagine either of these – collage or photojournalism – to be

mixed, or ‘intermedialised’, with performance. For, doing so still presumes

performance to be a sovereign category; this presumption preserves the initial

binary terms of the documentation problematic as Phelan lays it out:

performance (as action) on one hand; documentation on the other. As soon as

we attempt to draw distinctions between the performances based on how they

make use of media, we end up separating action from artifact and, thus, right

back where we started.

To think through performance’s relation to media (without losing either term to

the other’s priority), it is imperative to imagine an intermedium that does not

merely combine already identifiable, discrete artistic media (even if it changes

them into some other art form greater than the sum of its parts) but that also

bridges the space of art with activities, actions, and processes imagined to be

beyond its purview – i.e., the space of life, things not yet framed by artistic

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discourse and practice, but which can be brought within it. This is already to

some extent what Higgins had in mind with the examples he chooses, but he

points directly at this problem by mentioning Marcel Duchamp. He writes, ‘The

ready-made or found object, in a sense an intermedium since it is not intended

to conform to the pure medium … suggests a location between the general area

of art media and those of life media’. This location is the space between

Phelan and Auslander, and it is this blurry inter-zone between ‘art media’ and

‘life media’ that must be our point of departure in considering the relationship

between action and mediation in performance.

The readymade is usually thought of as an object lesson in radical dislocation, a

disjunctive leap across unlike spaces – take a urinal, remove it from the

bathroom (or hardware store), put it in a gallery, title it and it

becomes Fountain (fig.3). But the idea of intermediality (as bringing together ‘art

media’ and ‘life media’) suggests we should see the readymade as an act of

spatial compression instead, the production of a kind of wormhole that brings

these two formerly distant places infinitely close together, as opposed to a

definitive cleavage that separates them. Indeed, this production of proximity

explains much better why Fountain was capable of disgusting its first audiences

(and still is in every classroom in which I have ever taught). The object never

stops being a urinal but it also becomes sculpture, meaning it simultaneously is

and is not a urinal.

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Fig.3

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), Fountain 1917, replica 1964

© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002

This infinitesimal, vibrating, uncertain distance is what Duchamp called the

‘inframince’, usually translated as ‘infrathin’ – too thin to be thin, or even more

thin than thin. His examples include the warmth felt on the seat of a chair just

after someone gets up from it and the space between the front and back sides of

a sheet of paper. We experience the infrathin when ‘tobacco smoke exhaled

also smells of the mouth which exhales it’, or when we view an image painted on

glass from the non-painted side. The two elements – smoke and breath, or

glass and paint – remain intelligible, perceptible, but where one stops and the

other starts is unidentifiable, too fine to grasp.

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Performance brings art media and life media together along an infrathin edge.

This means that when we consider performance and media, we should not

lament the irretrievable loss of the stone, or erase its distinction from the watery

surround, but rather concentrate on the threshold moment between its being dry

and being wet. That kissing spatial plane, that temporal membrane, is

performance as a medium. It is an infrathin comingling of media – what we could

call an inframedium. To focus on the threshold this way is, pace Phelan and

Auslander, to imagine performance less as a thing in itself (whether located in

an action or its traces) and more as a spatial situation, as a mobile and

profoundly indistinct dividing line that joins form to experience and, by virtue of

its specific siting in a given work, describes the location and composition

of each.

As Fountain is both a urinal and a sculpture, so Leap into the Void is both an act

of faith and a controlled manipulation of form. It matters equally that Klein

jumped from the building and that he did so conceiving in advance that the final

product would be a collaged photograph. The image is designed to set the

border between live action and crystallised form buzzing. And it treats his body

and photography as media capable, when combined, of producing an artwork

that affords a glimpse of transcendence. Along with Auslander, we would have

to say that in this regard Leap reflects Klein’s ‘aesthetic project’. A canvas

saturated with impastoed International Klein Blue delivers the same momentary

defiance of gravity, as the experience of vision seems to dance free from its

corporeal anchor. But by using his own body (for once) to achieve this effect

Klein asks his viewers to see, additionally, how such a yearning can only ever be

expressed through form, how the search for the impossible and inexpressible is

conducted precisely through what we can do and make. Leap makes spirit chafe


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against flesh; the infrathin line that unites and divides the two is where the

performance happens.

Likewise, Shoot is both an act of self-sacrifice and a calculated presentation of

artistic mastery. It is crucial to the work that Burden really did get shot, and it is

equally important that the photographs convey this action in the way they do.

The flight of the bullet mimics the instantaneity of live action as Phelan would

see it, and the photographic strategy of capturing the moments just before and

after Burden gets hit heightens our apprehension of Shoot’s brief passage in

time. The photographs conspire to amplify the ephemerality, presenting it again

and again to new audiences. In these ways, again, Phelan and Auslander are

each right to some extent. But the point is to think both of these moments

together as comprising performance. It is worth mentioning, moreover, that one

of Duchamp’s many examples of the infrathin is the moment between hearing a

pistol fire and seeing its target pierced. The infrathin seam that joins signified

and signifier is what the perceiving audience encounters. With Shoot, we

confront the place where violence becomes an object of consumption. Art

historian Kathy O’Dell has argued that this piece (and other examples of what

she describes as masochistic body art of the 1970s) should be seen in relation

to their contemporaneous televisual environment, which featured the first ever

real-time images of combat as news coverage of the Vietnam War beamed its

way into American homes. Shoot was not only designed to be photographed,

but was mediated in advance in being a response to such televised footage (and

its having already married life media with art media).

Performance happens at the threshold of action and image. That place is

impossible to identify definitively, to cordon or sequester, and this is why even

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the most sophisticated attempts to define performance as a thing in itself end up

either submerging it beneath unknowable depths or conflating it with the forms

with which it travels. But approaching performance as an inframedium offers a

generative method for exploring works that might at first seem ‘opaque and

impenetrable’, as Higgins puts it. We need to worry less about the time of

performance and whether it was then or now or always, and think more about

where it happens, what it brings together and how that spatial situation both

questions and describes our own vantage onto the nexus of art and life.

Jonah Westerman

AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher, Tate

January 2015

Notes

Notes

Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, New York and

London 1993, p.146.

Ibid, p.148.

Philip Auslander, ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, PAJ

Journal of Performance and Art 84, vol.28, no.3, September 2006, p.5.

Ibid, p.2.

Ibid, p.5.

Ibid, p.9.

Dick Higgins, ‘Intermedia’, in Horizons, Illinois 1984, p.18. First published

in Something Else Newsletter 1, no.1,New York 1966.

Ibid, p.22.

Ibid, p.18.

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1981 addendum to ‘Intermedia’, ibid, p.27.

Ibid, p.20.

Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peteron (eds.), The Writings of Marcel

Duchamp, Oxford 1973, p.194. See also Thomas Girst, The Duchamp

Dictionary, London 2014, pp.97–8.

See Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and

the 1970s, Minneapolis 1998.


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