Abstract

The performance ‘Oral/Response’ joins an artist, Angela Bartram and a theorist, Mary O’Neill in research to analyse the dynamic, but often disjointed relationship between the live experience and its documentation by positioning both elements within the performance. Traditionally, the documentation of performance is a record left to stand for the work after the event that demonstrates an out of time viewpoint, which is a problem for ephemeral practice whose intention is to be ‘live’ and in the moment. The research in this performance offers a different strategy to counter this effect. To demonstrate this O’Neill transcribes the actions of Bartram as she performs a drawing by grinding charcoal to dust and blowing it across the floor.
This simultaneous dialogue between action and text evidences how performance and documentation can be reflexive and co-dependent. By making the text as evanescent as the act it describes it presents a nexus of theory and practice that combines different languages, different ways of knowing and experiencing. The rules and regulations that direct and confine solo compositions in text and action become less rigid, more malleable and symbiotic in this way.

Performances Oral/Response’ include Action Art Now for OUI York, BLOP Arnolfini, Environmental Utterance and the Future Can Wait. Published written analysis of ‘authored by the researchers can be found in Total Art Journal and Emergency Exit. ‘Oral/Response’ was selected for development through a residency at Grace Exhibition Space New York in 2012, and developed as ‘O/R’ for ‘Low Lives 4’ 2012.

The collaboration developed from a shared interest in ephemeral practice and its interpretation as situated writing. The artist/theorist research began with the peer reviewed e-journal article, ‘The Sacrifices Made by Audiences: the Complicit Discomfort of Viewing Performance Art’ published by Interdisciplinary Press after presentation at Culture, Politics, Ethics staged in Salzburg in 2010.