“Camera/Action” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography–an excellent survey of photographs and videos of performance pieces–demonstrates that while documenting performance art may not fully capture the originals, the documentation itself can convey feelings and ideas. Most of the 17 artists represented here use themselves as subjects, focusing on their own bodies, sometimes with narcissistic results.
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Performance artist Chris Burden once had himself shot in the arm, but his seemingly masochistic work seldom comes across as self-involved, instead raising general questions about the nature of compulsion. A 35-minute video documenting 11 of his early 1970s performances includes a section on Through the Night Softly (1973), in which he crawled across 50 feet of broken glass dressed only in shorts. “Yes, I did get cut up,” he says in a voice-over–that was one reason he had himself filmed in black and white. Instead of giving the full bloody effect of his action–one wonders what his cut-up body looked like and what his facial expressions were–this sketchy video leaves much to the imagination. Marina Abramovic in Rhythm 0 similarly becomes the focus of fantasies while remaining mysterious. In this 1974 performance she invited viewers to interact with her using any of 72 objects (listed below the image, they include such items as a spoon, a candle, and a book). Here a single photo shows her with her shirt open and a man who might be kissing her breast, while she holds one of the listed objects, a rose.
For two of the artists, conceiving the photos is the performance. Jemima Stehli foregrounds her own presence almost alarmingly in her “Mirror” self-portraits. Mirror No. 3 is filled mostly with her fingers in close-up, while her leg and part of her back can be seen through them in a mirror propped behind her. The consciously narcissistic effect is to almost fill the composition with her flesh, seen from various perspectives at once. Stehli’s are among the few works in the show that use color, texture, and composition as expressive tools, in this case to enhance the sense of ubiquitous skin.
through December 23
4Art
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Fred Camper.
