In recent years, as the culture industry has triumphed, art has increasingly withdrawn from the world. In its place, one finds documentation of art, suggesting that art is not immediately present, but hidden, its coefficient of artistic visibility too low for it to be detected and identified as such. There can be no overarching explanation of this quest for the “outside,” but there is one undeniable consequence. That is, that art no longer takes place in art galleries, museums or other exhibition spaces but rather in documentation centers and archives. Increasingly it is through documents rather than through artwork that art is framed or more precisely “performed.”
Though it remains something of an exaggeration to state the case in such emphatic terms, counterintuitive assertions of this kind have the advantage of drawing attention to a broad and powerful shift in terms of how art appears in the world and where it is perceived as such. My contention is that the performative framework of the artworld is shifting dramatically. One way to verify this hypothesis would be to (provisionally) transform an acknowledged exhibition space into a documentation center, where otherwise invisible practice is made visible as art. Instead of showing artworks, signed by authors, to be consumed by spectators, documents would be shown of symbolic activities and configurations whose self-understanding is grounded in art but whose appearance is unframed by artworld conventions. How are such phenomena to be reframed in such a way as to acquire artistic visibility if not through documentation?
The challenge is to unpack this issue both spatially and conceptually, curatorially and discursively, because it is all too easy to confound – as the conventional artworld does – documents and artworks. Our horizon of expectations with regard to art remains conditioned by the supposed presence of the artwork: it continues to seem virtually self-evident that art appears in the world in the form of artworks. Yet this supposition seems increasingly to fly in the face of much contemporary practice, where in lieu and stead of iconic artworks, museum and gallery users find themselves confronted with artistic documents. In the absence of any sustained critical effort of categorization, these documents are assimilated with artworks, with which after all they often share the same medium (video, photography, drawing, painting, installation) without laying claim to the same iconic status or regime of visibility.
To the extent that the document is conceptualised at all, it is typically subordinated to the artwork and thought of as offering perceptual access to an artistic performance or intervention which took place in another space or time; the document is seen, in other words, as essentially representational. But at issue here is another genre of document, one that was hardly imaginable – inasmuch as it lacked an object – even a few years ago. Artistic practices with deliberately impaired coefficients of artistic visibility can only be brought into the performative framework of the artworld by means of the document. It is thus the document that operates as a performative, changing the ontological status of symbolic configurations and activities, which had not been perceived as artistic propositions per se. It transforms the “mere real thing” into art. Though this genre of document remains under-theorised, it has already become widespread and will become increasingly so as stealth practices themselves become more generalised. Does the performative document not herald a new status for art, anticipating a reconfiguration of art’s conditions of appearing in the world? Will there come a day when art will no longer be exhibited by means of iconic artworks in galleries and art centres but through performative documents in documentation centres?
