Marisa Zanotti Scores, Stills and ScreensDocumentation in Artist Doctorates

Documentation in fine art and live art practices has for a long time been a part of the process of developing work. In performing arts however it is only relatively recently that creating documentation at different stages of process has become a part of the culture of making and showing. There are several factors that have led to this evolution. Perhaps the most significant is easy access to cheap, high-quality, portable recording technologies in the form of smart phones and digital cameras with controllable settings that once might have been only available to highly trained specialists. Another consideration is a culture of funding and related arts marketing that encourages artists to demystify work by offering access to an ongoing process. For many artists the opportunity, desire or demand to use documentation in the development of an artistic identity is also about engaging an audience and maintaining a public profile through online platforms and social media networks. In this case, documentation is often a part of a broader strategy of staying ‘visible’.

In an artistic doctorate the role of screen documentation is no less complex, not only because many artists working in live practice find recordings of their finished work unsatisfactory (which I will discuss later) but also because the duration of the doctoral process can necessarily generate many screen documents all of which will have different functions. It’s also interesting to consider the relationship between the intended audience and the documentation as like a performance, the documentation of performance held in an archive is not static.

Images and formats gather and shed significance through time. In the context of a thesis, documentation may also be in a dynamic relationship with those who watch it. It’s likely that during the course of the research, documentation will be looked at by supervisors and perhaps examiners, however it might also be useful or indeed necessary to make documents accessible to other people: collaborators, other artists, researchers, students, the public and funders, past and future. Asking how these different audiences and contexts could strategically inform both how a document is made, and also where and how it is screened, becomes significant.

I’m focussing on documentation created with analogue or digital camera technologies in the form of moving image documents and stills, including screen artefacts such as GIFS or memes. Other combinations of documentation strategies such as notational scores, drawings or sound recordings might be equally valid in relation to specific artistic research methodologies. It’s worth considering how different kinds of documents, documentation portfolios and screening platforms might speak to different aspects of research.

Screen documentation sometimes serves in performance projects as a way of remembering the form of a work and might be used in tandem with other forms of documentation, for example notebooks or process blogs. Documents created over the duration of several years can be analysed at a distance at different stages of the research in order to identify themes and patterns that were perhaps not immediately visible in the moment of doing. For example you could discover that the way you worked on something might be more significant than what you went on to make.

In the context of artistic doctorates the problem might be not with remembering a form but rather knowing in advance what it is that you should be trying to remember. So then, do you record everything? Digital technologies make it easy to do this, but the problem then becomes if you record everything, how do you know what might be important later?

What would it be like if, instead, recordings, stills and other screen artefacts were a strategic part of a creative research methodology and the making of the documents a mode of research itself. In this thinking images become containers of ideas from your research and are thought of in terms of mnemonics whose visual codes can unlock information. In this model image making, and the reading of these images after the fact, can be a way of revealing something not immediately perceivable in your bodily experience in the studio or in any final performance stage of your work.

The scores below explore different documentation strategies including how working with a camera might become less about representing your work and more about developing material through the lens as a way of shifting perceptual focus. Perhaps, a kind of shorthand in the future development of the thesis.

The video artist Bill Viola speaks about the underlayers of an image (Viola 1996, 75), the writing and thinking that happens before making an image. In this score the underlayers to the image making initially are discovered through the body as a result of watching, noticing, moving and writing. This score has two related stages, you could choose to do them on one day or over a period of time. The score generates new movement material. You could ask what this new material reveals to you. How does it relate to your original intentions and any theoretical contexts you are working in?

You could move to an additional stage of score No 1.

This score asks you to explore your work by viewing it on different devices to heighten your sensitivity to how different kinds of viewing contexts invite different modes of engagement by a viewer. You might like to explore which of these devices is right for your artistic intentions, for what you want someone to see. You can take this further by playing with online sites – for example what is the difference between putting your documentation on Youtube rather than Vimeo, Instagram rather than Twitter

This is a score that pretends you are shooting on film (of course, you might be). Shooting stills or moving image on an analogue camera means shooting ratios have to be considered, this usually leads to shooting less and a different kind of compositional process.

Score No 4. Is offered as a provocation and you might find it interesting to refer to Michel Chion’s writing on sound in film in Audio-Vision (Chion 1994).

The research submitted as part of an artist doctorate might include more than one performance or a work performed at different stages in its development. The much quoted Peggy Phelan statement ‘Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented…’ (Phelan 1993, 146) speaks to a dissatisfaction that many artists have with the documentation of their live performances. However some screen artists documenting the practice of other artists choose to reveal something about the specificity of a performance and the subjectivity involved in documentation. They develop poetic strategies that speak about the possibility of many responses to their subjects celebrating the inherent instability of performance itself.

Documenter Becky Edmunds proposes in her essay “Documents and Disappearance” (Edmunds 2007, 107) that if we accept that Phelan is right her statement also becomes an invitation for creative responses that play in what Edmunds describes as ‘the gap’. Edmunds speaks about her approach to the fragmentary nature of the process of video documentation. In her work with artist Fiona Wright, Edmunds finds a way to speak from inside the process as a documenter and to draw attention simultaneously to her subjective response and to the partial nature of any document.

A similarly subjective approach is found in 1971’s Football Like Never Before (Costard 1971) where artist Helmuth Costard uses a multi-camera strategy in filming the entirety of a football game in real time between Manchester City and Coventry focussing only on one player, the mercurial George Best. Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon use a similar multi-camera strategy focussing on one footballer for the duration of a football match. However in Zidane (Parreno and Gordon 2007) when they follow Zinedine Zidane for the duration of the game between Real Madrid and Villareal the resulting film reveals an intense physicality, the labour of football and the psychological complexity of Zidane himself, as much as the football match that night.

In the area of performance Babette Mangolte’s document of Trisha Brown’s Water Motor (Mangolte 1971) uses the technique of showing us the dance twice, the second time Mangolte filmed in slow motion specifically to reveal the extraordinary co-ordinations in Brown’s body. It’s interesting to note that Mangolte learned Water Motor before filming it, she sought to experience and embody Brown’s choreographic reality before committing it to the screen. In another distinctive documentary filmmaker Chantal Akerman working with Mangolte documented Pina Bausch’s tour in her work Un Jour Pina A Demandé (Akerman 1996) in a film that speaks to both Akerman’s relationship to her time with Wuppertal Dance Theatre and different aspects of Bausch’s process and the performers in her work.

There is an argument that for doctoral research that results in one key performance as the culmination of the practical work, subjective poetic documents are a way to speak to the complexity of the performance and will support the defence of a doctorate. So for example, getting six people to document the performance on their phones and cutting that together might be useful and indeed appropriate. Conversely for some work and some examiners the best kind of documentation is one that adopts a simple camera and sound strategy. However even the simplest idea will open up a number of questions and artistic choices that are significant in making it easy for your examiners to see what it is that you want to show them.

Whatever way you choose to work, in documenting live performance perhaps in the camera strategy the most important thing to consider is the relationship of the work to the space and the audience. So performance in the round or on the move should probably be recorded differently from performance taking place front on or in traverse.

Performance on the move will probably need more documentation rehearsal than performance that takes place in one space. It might be useful to work on documentation with someone in advance of the final performance, this might be a professional camera person and/ or editor if that’s a possibility. If that’s not an option it’s probably good to have done preparation with someone who can take responsibility for the documentation process on the day.

In any written component that relates to your work signposting confidently what images or excepts refer to, making documentation easy to access and directing examiners to specific moments in the document can all be thought of as ways of ‘teaching’ your examiners how to look at your original research. So this last page isn’t so much a score but a series of considerations that I hope are helpful in the final stages of your thesis.