Performing the Document: New Political Theatricalities

The development of research-based art, rooted in the gathering of information, has transformed many artists into deviant historians who alter archival practices by putting knowledge on display as a minimally handled readymade. As such art practices often involve compensating for historical blind spots, the most interesting artists don’t hesitate to “custom-make” their exhibits by inventing their own documentation when it is missing. Their operative and reformative approaches legitimize art as the key arena for perilous games of truth — games that, in turn, broaden art’s frontiers.

Concurrently, debates on the place of performance in the exhibition have preoccupied curators for over a decade, causing them to question the limitations of the (photographic or video) document as a substitute for the live act in the art space. The two phenomena were quite distinct until some artists began using performance to reconstruct their research, creating new forms of embodied, or even literally “interpreted,” scholarship. It is as though the unresolved issue of “documenting the performance” was being replaced by the inverse and more constructive issue of “performing the document.” Eric Baudelaire, Dora García, Walid Raad: these three artists have little in common other than a practice involving a reconstruction of facts that borrows from poetry and fiction in the interest of cognitive efficiency. Also, all three artists recently turned towards various forms of performativity, imbuing their rigorous documentary practices with a sensual and theatrical air.