'Live Art on Camera' at John Hansard Gallery

Sunday, 14 October 2007 00:33

Southampton, UK - Live Art on Camera reveals the work of photographers and filmmakers who documented seminal performance art events from the 1950s to the present in Europe, the United States and Japan. The exhibition focuses on themes integral to the complex debate surrounding the subject, status and ontology of performance documentation. On exhibition until 10 November, 2007 at John Hansard Gallery.

Performance events are primarily received through still images: arguably subjective records, translated through the intentions, ideas and aesthetics of the photographer. "Live Art on Camera" contextualises photographic documentation within the photographers’ or filmmakers’ wider practices. Material is presented through installations, videos, photo/text works, periodicals, artists’ books as well as more traditionally displayed photography.

 Works featured include Japanese photographer Ohtsuji Kiyoji’s photographs of the 1950s Gutai group, shown alongside his surrealist photography, and writings. Peter Moore’s architectural photographs of Penn Station which he documented throughout the station’s gradual destruction from 1962 to 1966, are seen in relation to examples from his extensive archive of USA performance photographs, including Allan Kaprow’s and Wolf Vostell’s Happenings. The relationship between the ‘photographed’, the camera and the viewer was addressed in early works by Babette Mangolte, such as her film The Camera: Je, 1977 and A Photo Installation, 1978. In a parallel practice Mangolte also consistently and extensively photographed performance works by Yvonne Rainer, Robert Whitman, Joan Jonas, Richard Foreman and Trisha Brown.

Ana Mendieta ’s performances were recorded by a number of friends, fellow students and family members. Mendieta's lover and tutor, artist Hans Breder, made the photo-documentation of some of her early performances in Iowa and Oaxaca. In the same locations and often within the same time-frame Hans Breder also photographed his own site specific works for which Mendieta sometimes modeled.

In the case of Carolee Schneemann’s work many different photographers documented single performances. The exhibition reveals the diverse photographic styles of these individuals, compared and contextualised in relation to their ongoing practices.

Artists and photographers in Live Art on Camera : Marina Abramović and Ulay, Dona Ann McAdams, Hans Breder, Stuart Brisley and Leslie Haslam, Hollis Frampton, Hugo Glendinning, Gutai Group, Lisa Kahane, Ute Klophaus, Jennifer Kotter, Kurt Kren, Antonio Lauer, Babette Mangolte, Rosemary Mayer, Fred W. McDarrah, Robert R. McElroy, Ana Mendieta, Peter Moore, Kiyoji Ohtsuji, Leda Papaconstantinou, Adrian Piper, Tony Ray-Jones, Carolee Schneemann (from the Schneemann archive photographs by Arman, Manfred Schroeder, Harvey Zucker, Al Giese, Massal, Cheney, Sally Dixon and Anthony McCall) Manuel Vason.

Live Art on Camera is a John Hansard Gallery exhibition curated by Alice aude-Roxby.

Visit John Hansard Gallery at : www.hansardgallery.org.uk