Live Art on Camera (2007–2008), publication and exhibition at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton UK and SPACE, London.

 

Live Art on Camera was an attempt to consider photographs of seminal performances in relation to the wider context of the photographer’s practice. Interviews with artists Hans Breder, who photographed Ana Mendieta, and Rosemary Mayer who photographed Adrian Piper’s Catalysis series, opened up a sense of actuality of the live event but also a crossover between their own artistic practices and lives. In the exhibition, we placed the works of Mendieta and Breder together, the photographs for each were taken in very close succession timewise and often in the same locations, with Mendieta as model for Breder’s work, following his photography of her actions.

 

The scope of the project brought together works from the 1950s Japanese artist group Gutai to contemporary performance and photographic practices. The book and research on show were the result of many interviews that I carried out during visits to photographers’ and artists’ archives, opening up networks, working relations and the different photographic conventions that have emerged over the decades. Collectively, these conversations also reflected very different values put on performance photographs from the ‘free’ ephemeral version to the museum collected art object, my interviews took place in diverse archival locations from bank vaults to bedrooms.

 

With photographs, videos and works by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Joseph Beuys, Hans Breder, Stuart Brisley and Leslie Haslam, Hollis Frampton, Hugo Glendenning, Gutai, Lisa Kahane, Ute Klophaus, Kurt Kren, Anonio Lauer (Tomislav Gotovac), Babette Mangolte, Rosemary Mayer, Dona Ann McAdams, Fred McDarrah, Robert McElroy, Ana Mendieta, Peter Moore, Ohtsuji Kiyoji, Leda Papaconstantinou, Adrian Piper, Tony Ray Jones, Carolee Schneemann, Manuel Vason. Essays by Kathy O’Dell, Barbara Clausen, Ute Klophaus, Carrie Lambert-Beatty. Alice Maude-Roxby interviews with Carolee Schneemann, Shimamoto Shozo, Leda Papaconstantinou, Hans Breder, Rosemary Mayer, Lisa Kahane, Dona Ann McAdams.