Text: Rani Lavie
14 images from a video work by Ruti Sela, created for the "Moments. A History of Performance in 10 Acts" exhibition, and performed in April 2012 at the ZKM museum in Karlsruhe, Germany. The exhibition's curators, Georg Schöllhammer, Sigrid Gareis and choreographer Boris Charmatz, had invited Sela to document and direct a commentary on the history of performance, to spend time with a group of dancers, performers and intellectuals at the museum during the exhibition, and to screen the work during the exhibition's closing events.
A Perverse Revival
In criminal law, a witness is someone who can provide information about a committed crime, based on first-hand experience. The act of testifying as a witness in court is an attempt to verbally describe what happened, as directly and objectively as possible, and elements such as the direction of one's gaze, posture, subjectivity or personal taste are considered irrelevant.
Giving witness is rarely thought of as art, primarily because crime is impossible in the lack of written laws to be observed, but also because the description of the artistic object or action is considered minor to structuring the work's meaning, and perceived as subjective rather than objective.
The spectators of a performance are in the role of interpreters, and the text they produce is somewhere between an expression of personal taste and a work with historical, philosophical, artistic, cultural and additional connotations. It is sometimes said that the inclusion of a work of art into art history depends on the amount of conversation it generates (subject to the speakers' power and the symbolic or economic capital), so the aura of the artwork has shifted from the object to the conversation, with the spectator holding the position that shapes the work. The spectator, therefore, is a conspirator, not a witness.
And yet, a spectator of a performance of live art which is, by its nature, transient (performance, dance) also holds the role of a witness. Video or still photography cannot, as documents, fully reconstruct the spatial context of the performance; the spectator has the ability of testifying to what happened, and so pass it on.
This question of the preservation of works of dance and performance is at the center of contemporary theoretical thought. One of the most interesting propositions was made by Boris Charmatz, who founded the Dancing Museum in Rennes, France. This project wishes to examine different ways of displaying dance in a museum space, which may alter the time of dance, usually equal to theatrical time (about 60 minutes per show), but also the live time of performance, translating it into an eternal, silent object. The "Moments" exhibition is part of this project, wishing to represent and preserve some of the most important performance works of the 20th century with objects, photographs, videos and texts.
In this interstice between the spectator-witness and the objectified performance, "The Witness" is a response to performances based on a certain fraud, or a crime of art (as in the case of Lynn Hershman Leeson, who impersonated a fictional persona for a whole year, or Graciela Carnevale, who locked people in a gallery).
"The Witness" identified a moment in art in which it is in a dialogue with the law, and the spectator becomes less of an external interpreter and more of a participant-victim, a witness. In her work, Sela uses elements from the original performances, and so reconstructs-reproduces them in a perverse revival, a new crime of opposition to the museum's already perverse attempt to contain them.
The "Moments" exhibition seeks to represent and preserve performance by way of its remains, material representations that are to give witness and hold some of the content and meaning of the original work, objects which aim to return the power to the object (which is easier to discipline and govern), on performance's expense. Is this the right way to approach the conservation of a live work? Or does it create new kinds of difficulties? Does the transformation of performances to objects-witnesses add insult to the injury – an injury which institutionalizes the original crime (impersonation, locking people in a gallery), blurs it, and gives it an easy-to-handle shelf life?
To conclude, within this system of crimes and testimonies, "The Witness" offers an additional way out: a moment which is external to the "recreated" performance, an external point of view which becomes inextricable from it. This happens when the testimonies are accumulated in the hotel room, creating a reconstruction of the reconstruction of the reconstruction. As the relationship between crime and testimony recedes into an infinity of recreations, the hotel room becomes a space that is all testimony, and for that reason, a space in which crime is impossible. Or a place for the perfect crime, as all witnesses are also performers.