1. Enduring Documents: Re-Documentation in Marina Abramović's Seven Easy Pieces.
- Author
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Shalson, Lara
- Subjects
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DOCUMENTATION , *PERFORMING arts , *THEATER research , *REPRODUCTION of money, documents, etc. - Abstract
Documentation makes us suffer. This is, perhaps, an overstatement. Yet, the writing on performance art gives testimony to a range of discomforts that arise in relation to documentation. From anxieties about its insufficiency as record, to despair that documents are easily commodified, to unease with the very desire that documents seem to solicit, concerns about documentation have long been at the heart of discussions about performance art. In recent years, artistic re-enactment has seemed to some to promise a solution to the shortcomings of mediatized forms of documentation. Yet, many of these events have remained tangled up with documentation nevertheless, and an uneasy relationship to documents persists. This article focuses on this persistence of discomfort. Drawing upon my own experience attending Marina Abramović’sSeven Easy Pieces(2005), I ask what it might mean to endure documents. Responding to criticisms that Abramović recreated documentation rather than performances, and focusing in on the durational form of the work, I argue that Abramović’s sustained embodied engagement with performance documentation offers new insights into how performance and its documents endure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2013
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