Response to "The Performativity of Performance Documentation"

In the essay “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” Philip Auslander makes distinctions between the authenticity of an artist’s performance in front of a live audience which is documented for further evaluation and an artist’s performance with a lack of a “significant audience” which is documented for initial and future evaluation. In other words, to some critics, a performance in front of a live audience is more real and substantial than a performance in front of a camera. I tend to agree with Auslander’s assessment that, “…the act of documenting an event as performance is what constitutes it as such.” Such could be said of most genres. While the works of filmmakers Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg (Epic Movie, Disaster Movie) are, in my opinion, some of the most un-amusing comedies I have ever seen, but do they cease to be comedies? I argue that they were intended to be comedies; therefore they are categorized as such.

On the flipside, one could argue that the interpretation of an event as performance art does not require the event be conceived as such, but rather to be perceived as such. To support this, I refer to Auslander’s notes where he talks of Vito Acconci’s Photo-Piece: “Some might take exception to my categorizing of Acconci’s work as performance. […] I make no apology for claiming it for performance. I am hardly the only one to do so.” One could say that a specific starting date for performance art cannot be pinpointed because the term performance art can be retroactively applied to many works of art throughout history. Perhaps most artistic works could be under the realm of performance art with enough persistent argumentation and subsequent agreements from the audience.