Framing performance art: Acts of documenting in 'Being and Doing' (1984)

To explore documenting practices in detail that use the time-based medium of film to engage with performance art’s negotiation of duration and disappearance, this article addresses Stuart Brisley’s and Ken McMullen’s 16 mm film “Being and Doing”. “Being and Doing” is an experimental, highly subjective documentation of live art practices of the late 1970s and early 1980s in Eastern and Western Europe. The film’s highly concentrated and rhythmically elaborate montage assembles photographs, sound recordings, footage of communal rituals, and artists’ performances with a voice-over narration by Brisley. Starting from a detailed analysis of particular montage sequences the article elaborates on the inventive aesthetics of “Being and Doing” as a conjunction of body art practices and a process-oriented mode of documentation, which is concerned with the frame as the essential constituent of film form