The performance document: assimilations of gesture and genre

Artist or activist actions and performances often take place just once and are intended to be experienced live. These actions are recorded and disseminated through photography and video taken from a range of perspectives, from paid-up and pre-briefed “professional” photographers or videographers through to spontaneously taken images by audience members or passers-by. Inevitably “documentation” is never neutral and these records are infused with the stylistic intervention and conventions of the photographer in question. Within our conversation, we locate the performance document as the site of a potential two-way assimilation of gesture and stylistic attributes of diverse photographic conventions. In our co-writing, we track parallel analyses of photographs taken by commercial photographer Françoise Masson of the 1970s actions of artist Gina Pane and the utilization of photographs within the contemporary lens-based practice of Dinu Li, in which gesture and conventions are assimilated and move fluidly backwards and forwards between political propaganda, film, documentary, and domestic photography