“The Delicate Art of Documenting Performance” in Art, lies and videotape: exposing performance (2003), Tate Liverpool, Tate publishing

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Mapping to works included in Adrian George’s Tate Liverpool  Art, lies and videotape: exposing performance exhibition, this essay built on interviews with performance artists and their photographers that took place during archive and studio visits. I had been particularly interested to draw out the ways in which the individual and particular aesthetics of photographers can be applied to the practices of performance artists whose work they documented. In cases such as the performances of Carolee Schneemann, several photographers were present photographing and through comparison it was possible to map how different styles infuse different ways of seeing and how photographic aesthetics become fused to the action. The research focused on photographs of Joseph Beuys by Ute Klophaus, of Gina Pane by Françoise Masson, of Carolee Schneemann by Anthony McCall (and others), Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown by Babette Mangolte. It also included a site visit to Tate’s conservation department to see Carolee Schneemann’s 1975 Interior Scroll, which was in the process of going through laboratory processes to conserve all aspects including the splatterings of beetroot juice and urine by the artist onto the prints’ surface.