Comparison of artefacts of an interactive performance with audio technology by Steffi Weisman (artist, Berlin), on 19 August 2011, during the exhibition and mediation project archiv performativ: a model in the Klingental exhibition space Basel
A) Synopsis of the performance LapStrap
LapStrap is an interactive solo performance by Steffi Weismann with audio technology. Weismann wears a hip belt fitted with audio equipment (microphones, a signal processor, an amplifier and several speakers) which she controls herself as she moves about the space with the audience, entering into dialogues about the context of the event with spectator-listeners. The performer appears as a human sound-processing machine, producing and performing phases and loops of sound, speech, listening and thought and re-using pre-produced sound collages of Weismann’s voice and voices from the audience. In this way, on an audio level, past performances are linked with the current situation.[1]
B) Selection of artefact types
I have limited my analysis to two artefact types which process seeing and hearing separately and which I compare in terms of their performative function in transcribing the situation. To examine the specific medial functions of the audio recording and the chronological series of 60 photos, I ask: In which way do the two artefact types retell the performance or represent the idea of the performance? The audio recorder was not switched on until it was clear that the performance had begun, for which reason the first informal nine minutes of the performance are not recorded. From the first 14 photos in the series, however, we see that the performance already began in the display room of the exhibition. Only the photos convey, though fragmentarily, the entire course of the performance; the soundtrack documents only from the point when the audience follows Weismann into the back room.
C) Similarities/differences in transmission and transcription by the two recording methods in view of the constituent aspects of the performance with regard to content and form: The chronologically numbered photo series makes the performance’s dramaturgical arrangement in two parts legible. The photos show the course of the performance and the performer’s movements and gestures, hinting at the production of an auditory level. The audio recording clearly demonstrates the fact that it is a kind of acoustic composition, concerned with sounds and recording, statements on past events and spoken statements in real time. Both artefact types convey the fact that Weismann’s appearance was an audio performance in which the presence of the performer as a moving ‘sound-processing body’ played an important role. Both artefacts also indicate the use of technical equipment including microphones, amplifiers, speakers, a loop device and a voice modulator.
To describe the differences between the artefact types, I will consider the auditory level first: The audio recording transmits live produced and pre-produced elements in which the voices of the performer and voices from the audience can be heard both live and in a pre-recorded or modulated form. Sounds arising from the live situation, e.g. creaking and rustling, and sounds generated by technical manipulation such as loops and voice distortion and apparently fed in over speakers can also be heard. As one of the project’s participants, I know that statements by other participants working in the model archive in the first week were used for these, as well as the short responses of spectators at the live event to the performer’s question of how they feel. While these words and statements can be heard and understood without knowledge of the context, the intention behind them (or object of them) can not necessarily be inferred from the audio recording. It is striking how the performer’s voice is clearly recognisable and distinct from the others on the audio recording, whether sounding in real time at the live event or played back over speakers, although the recording reproduces all voices via speakers.
Certain photos in the picture series point to the auditory level by the performer’s gestures they show, e.g. Weismann holding a microphone to a guest’s mouth. Moreover, certain physical and textural dimensions can only be inferred from the picture series, since the audio recording evokes nothing in this respect. The picture series reveals on a visual level how the performer acts and what she does. Weismann takes up various physical positions in front of the audience. Sometimes she stands, legs apart, with her back to the audience, so that attention is drawn to the speaker attached to her behind. She touches and operates the hip belt in the manner of a self-assured gunslinger. The photos highlight the hip belt and its technical equipment and the wearer’s pelvic region. They also convey the technical side of Weismann’s performance, showing her turning knobs and operating a loop device, a Mikroport or an external microphone.
On the spatio-temporal (ambient) dimension: The chronologically numbered picture series allows the viewer to make out Weismann’s movement in time and space. The performer changes her positions, standing sometimes at the front by the audience, sometimes going back to the wall. The dimensions and composition of the spatial situation, with furniture and technical equipment, are rendered visually, from which an ambient mood can also be read. We see a lot of wood, bright light and a lot of spectators in a cramped space. The photos portray temporal fragments; the performance’s duration remains unclear. Over approximately 15 minutes, 60 photos were taken, so that one must have been taken roughly every 15 seconds. This implies that the photographer took pictures relatively steadily and evenly throughout. No impression of the space is conveyed by the audio recording. Although loud and soft passages can be heard, we cannot tell to what extent these arose from the sources being at different distances to the recording equipment or from the performer’s deliberate adjusting of the speaker volume. The sound does, however, convey the impression of an intimate atmosphere. What we hear congeals into a single sound collage, which reflects the temporal structure of the performance but also conveys breaks and pauses which cannot be explained since nothing can be heard.
Observations on audience reactions and the contextual or situative dimension: Human sounds such as soft laughter, chortling and snorting can be heard as well as dialogues. For example, Weismann asks “Was ist jetzt?” [‘What’s up now?’], somebody in the audience answers “Hitze!” [‘Heat’] and a short time later these words can be heard in a technologically processed loop. Listening closely, the real time speech and sounds can be distinguished from the pre-produced and relayed statements. Weismann’s real time interactions with the audience are primarily conveyed by audio means and only to a slight degree by visual means. Only six out of 60 photos show members of the audience as well as the performer. The photographer’s focus remains on the performer and never wanders to the spectator-listeners – both during the walk through the model archive in the first part (picture nos. 577-586) and a little later, when Weismann interacts with or questions four people (picture nos. 604/605; 610/611). These few pictures show a pensive, attentive audience, with arms and legs crossed, sitting or standing leaned against the wall, gazing at the floor. Only those who are being questioned are smiling or smirking on the photos. The fact that the artist conceived this as a situative work, i.e. one that reacts with the site, the space, the spectators and the context, can only be surmised from the photos.
The audio recording, on the other hand, conveys a clear impression of the context and the site-specificity, e.g. when, after the walk through the model archive, Weismann asks the audience what happened to those who missed the live event or when she asks the spectators what they would remember. Weismann’s speech points to the fact that live and remembered experiences are the theme of her work and that she performatively involves the audience in this. The spatial context is communicated only by the photos; the fact that it is a windowless room made of wood representing an exhibition space and an archive.
D) Discourses, analysis and transcription
The picture series considered here, of a steady stream of photos taken throughout Steffi Weismann’s performance LapStrap, is a traditional, documentary form of performance photography.
In 1997, U.S. performance theorist Amelia Jones pointed out that photos and performance are inextricably linked and mutually dependent. The performance needs the photo to be recognised as a performance and the photo needs the performance which preceded it. The performance can only be described as original by the photo which documents it. Jones writes: “The photograph needs the body art event as an ontological anchor of its indexicality.”[1] Philip Auslander describes photographs depicting performances which actually took place as a ‘documentary category’ (cf. the photograph Shoot by Chris Burden). This represents, Auslander says, the traditional view of the relationship between performance art and its documentation. He contrasts this with the ‘theatrical category’ of photographs of performances which are realised solely in the medium of photo-montage (cf. The Leap into the Void by Yves Klein).[2] Barbara Clausen supports Auslander’s proposal when she says that documentation mysticizes the lost moment and is hence repeatedly sought after as a substitute. By staging and repeating the disappearance of the performance, the documentation re-asserts the act of disappearance again and again.[3] The photograph – especially the isolated image – conveys a ‘frozen’ captured moment out of the time continuum, negotiated by the interpretative perspective of the photographer. Photos with an iconic character, especially, which capture a specific photogenic moment, often do not correlate with the highpoint of the performance, since they are produced with a view to getting ‘the best picture’ and not capturing the event’s process. In view of this, the picture series is a valuable alternative, not only because the temporal structure and the process-based nature of the performance can be inferred from it, but also because the role of the photographer is less prominent.
The photographer of our picture series directed her attention exclusively at the performer and, in order not to miss anything, took photographs rhythmically at regular intervals. The recording practice of taking a steady stream of photographs throughout an event is recognisable and founded in the practice and discourse of Babette Mangolte, an experimental filmmaker and photographer, who documented many (dance) performances of the 1970s. Describing her photographic practice, Mangolte stresses that the photographs she took were not supposed to represent her or her taste but show what she had seen. She believed a strategy of selflessness to be important when taking photographs which were to function later as documents. To achieve objectivity, Mangolte combined concepts of automatism and chance and used increased shutter speed. In this way, she aimed to convey the particular style of each work as far as possible. She proposed that the photograph does not capture the action from the point of view of a spectator but represents the act of seeing, whereas the moving image always presupposes the position of a spectator.[4]
The audio-visual experience of Weismann as a live-acting sound-processing body – that is, a kind of fusion of physicality and technology generating a sound collage – is part of the specificity of this work. In this respect, Weismann’s work can be viewed in the tradition of Fluxus and acoustic art. In the 1970s, mediatised radio features changed the public’s listening habits and the emergence of various technological audio-media gave rise to listening situations which challenged people’s perception. Since then, acoustic montages of noises and musical and non-musical sounds with spatial and physical factors have often been used as a creative medium for performance practice.[5] Doris Kolesch and Sibylle Kraemer suggest that the reasons for the ‘late-coming’ of audio-technologies and the relatively recent interest in acoustic phenomena and the voice lie in the hitherto predominant reliance on optical and movement apparatus. The now common practice in contemporary art of freeing the voice from its function in the service of language and reason and using it as material for sounds and noises, often woven into a complex structure of sound, did not begin until the modern age. Communication and dialogue are no longer central. The production and reproduction of voices has made the technologically processed voice ubiquitous.[6]
In the audio recording on hand, live speech can be clearly distinguished from pre-recorded voices relayed in the live situation. This calls to mind the liveness discourse which – as Philip Auslander has proposed in disagreement with Peggy Phelan – is generated by the media. According to Auslander, ‘liveness’ is an effect of mediatisation. With the first live recordings of performances on the radio in about 1934 and the emergence of live broadcasts of major events in the 1970s, the category of liveness became relevant. Since then, a clear distinction has grown between the two categories ‘live’ and ‘mediatised’.[7] For Auslander, however, ‘performance’ always denotes the co-existence of the live event with its medial reproduction – and not, as Phelan believes, just the one ‘authentic’ event.[8] These phenomena are explored in Weismann’s work LapStrap.
I would like to come back to two points which characterise this performative transcription. Because Weismann’s performance addresses the many voices and forms of collective authorship inherent in the archive, which take effect in performance art through iteration (i.e. the performative repetition of precedents), the performance itself can be read as an artistic transcription of the model archive and the contents it negotiates. By the same token, the audio-recording – received in isolation – transcribes the live event as a kind of modern radio play.
Steffi Weismann’s work oscillates between an audio experience and a physically interactive experience between herself as an active sound-processing body and the audience, so that its specificity cannot be fully conveyed by means of either a picture series or an audio recording alone. This kind of interactive and audio-visual performance practice needs to be audio-visually recorded if the material is to be used for historical documentation and/or further research. Artistic works, on the other hand, may be prompted by transcriptions of a fragmentary nature. Recording machinery being switched on too late or not at all occurs typically when opening and closing situations are not talked through with the artist. It is up to the artist to make the necessary arrangements concerning what is to be documented and what not, i.e. how the performance is to be mediated retrospectively, and to clarify this with the documenters and organisers prior to the performance.
Pascale Grau, May 2012
[1] Jones, Amelia, „’Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation“ in: Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter 1997), Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century, pp. 11–18.
[2] Auslander, Philip, “On the Performativity of Performance Documentation”, in: Barbara Clausen / Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (eds.), After the Act. The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art, Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg 2006.
[3] Clausen, Barbara, After the Act – The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art, in Clausen (ed.), op. cit.
[4] Mangolte, Babette, ‘Balancing act between instinct and reason or how to organize volumes on a flat surface in shooting photographs, films, and videos of performance’, in Barbara Clausen, (ed.), After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art, op.cit. pp. 35–41.
[5] Schöning, Klaus, „Ars Acustica – Ars performativa“, in: Petra Maris Heyer (ed.), Performance im medialen Wandel, Wilhelm Fink, Munich 2006, pp. 155–162.
[6] Kolesch, Doris, „Audiovisionen“, in: Kolesch / Sybille Krämer (eds.), Stimme, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2006, p. 49.
[7] Auslander, Philip, Liveness – Performance in a mediatized culture, Routledge, New York/London 1999, p. 65 ff.
[8] Schumacher, Eckhard, „Passepartout zu Performativität, Performance, Präsenz“, in: Texte zur Kunst, no. 37 (March 2000), p. 101.
[1] This description is based on Weismann’s concept description and, since I was not present at the event myself, a video recording of the performance (which is not considered in the comparison) as well as an analysis of the artefacts.
Audio
Bilder
