Still not seen : the hidden archive of performance

In this article I explore three ideas. First, I question the romantic rhetoric that sees in performance a constant vanishing that eludes attempts at commodifying it. The putative ephemerality of performance denies its resolute materiality; for an ephemeral art form it leaves a lot of 'stuff' around. Furthermore, doing performance materially affects the lives of those who do it. I argue that just as performance occurs in a field of economic production that affects how different works are viewed (according to their position in a value-based 'pecking order’); what remains of these is similarly treated. A performance can disappear a second time when the traces of it are not 'saved' by those concerned with documenting and archiving. The second idea I pursue is that of the hidden or illegitimate archive. By definition, an archive is an authoritative instrument based on its implicit promise to provide a true record of the past. This authority is inscribed, as Derrida wrote in Archive Fever (1995), in the Greek root of the word 'arkheion', or the place where the archontes, those who govern or rule, reside. David F. Bell, glossing Derrida's critique, writes that "in this space, set off from public space, rulers have the right not only to store official documents, but also to interpret them" (Bell 2004, 149-50). Benjamin Hutchens problematises the relationship between the authoritative archive and memory through his concept of the “an-archive", the unauthoritative or informal archive (Hutchens 2007). Performances leave material traces that include, these days, nearly always, photographs; and these tend to gather, like dust, in the bedroom cupboards and scrapbooks of the artists themselves. These collections form what I call artists' hidden or illegitimate archives. Finally, I consider the sadness that underpins the complex relationship that performing artists have to photographs of their work. As the work has now disappeared all that remains are the photographs, and possibly a video recording, of it. These are all that are left to represent the work in the world and, in standing in for it, they also erase it through the creation of a counter-memory. If the photographs are themselves hidden, then the work is doubly erased. Roland Barthes (2000 [1980]) writes that photographs provide certainty that the photographed subject was there, it existed once, but to the artist who created a work, is this enough? Art is not private and for performance this is especially so. As a director, I know my work was once there but the fact that it is no longer public, not even on the public record, this is what hurts and it is why I wish to write it into the archive because, as Helen Freshwater writes, "the archive exists in and through text, as the written record of another time" (Freshwater 2003, 733)