Some reflections on art documentation in relation to the work of art and the concept of originality By Anna Stein Ankerstjerne, curator and art communicator https://dk.linkedin.com/in/annasteinankerstjerne
Introduction Art documentation is a strange phenomenon that, when encountered, often leaves the viewer uncertain of its categorization. Is it a ‘para-text’1 that points at, and informs us about, something else or is it a self-referential work of art in its own right? In the first case there’s a risk that we never discover that the documentation has anything to do with art at all, or that we never realize that the documentation functions as a sign: a signifier that refers to art as a signified artistic activity or event.2 Thereby missing the whole point of documentation that, by its very definition, documents something else. In the second case, there’s a risk that we will contemplate the documentation as an autonomous work of art that we will judge on its formalistic qualities. In “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation” Boris Groys states that ‘art documentation is by definition not art; it merely refers to art.’3 In this paper I will look into the difference between artwork and art documentation, and question whether it is possible to differentiate between the two as art and non-art, as Groys suggests we do. What characterizes an artwork in contrast to art documentation when both are exhibited as art? When art documentation is exhibited, isn’t it, or why is it not, just as much a work of art as any other type of work of art? As suggested in the title, “Some reflections on art documentation in relation to the work of art and the concept of originality”, I don’t intend to arrive at a clear-cut solution as to how we are to comprehend the difference between artwork –and documentation. I would, however, like to look into this difference, turn it upside-down and test if art documentation can also be looked at as a work of art. 1
Dag Solhjell, “Paratekster –formidlingens former”, in Formidler og Formidlet –En teori om kunstformidlingens praksis, Universitetsforlaget, 2001. 2 Lecture by Lotte Phillipsen (“Creator/original”, 17 March 2010) with reference to Saussure’s semiology. 3 Boris Groys, “Art in the age of Biopolitics: From artwork to art documentation” (2002), in Art Power, MIT Press, 2008 (pp. 53-65), p. 53
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Art documentation in opposition to the work of art What characterizes a work of art? With Barthes as a point of departure,4 the work can be described as an entity of substance, a graspable empirical object that can be displayed, seen, and held in hand.5 The work of art can be ascribed to a ‘space of place’6 and thus it can be pointed at in reality.7 This last feature is something that Benjamin also stresses: a work of art has its unique presence in a specific time and place. For that reason we must travel to it to see it, as it doesn’t meet us halfway.8 This special temporal and spatial ‘now-absent real presence’ existence of the work of art is what renders it authentic, unique and auratic, according to Benjamin.9 For Groys, the original is also absent and hidden from immediate and omnipotent access. 10 And, in the discourse of art documentation that Groys pursues, it also has a unique relation to reality and life: as a matter of fact, the original, that is; the artistic activity that the documentation refers to, is identical to life.11 If the art documentation is to be defined in opposition to the aforementioned qualities, it would sound as follows if starting where I left off in the section above: If art is living, documentation is dead. So what other qualities can be ascribed to art documentation when viewed in opposition to the work of art? Surely it must be ‘alive’ at some level?
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Barthes uses the term work in relation to literary texts. The term is transferable to the concept of art-work, however with certain reservations: Barthes reading of what characterizes a work should be understood in relation to how we engage with and address the work, more than it characterizes specific qualities within the work itself. Additionally one must beware of the type of postmodern discourse that Barthes is inscribed into. This discourse has somewhat of an attitude towards the term work, reading it from a slightly skeptical and negative point of view, perhaps esp. towards its singularity (which is why Barthes suggests the more plural and playful treatment of the work as a text). Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text”, in idem. Image, Music, Text (1977), Noonday Press, 1998 (pp. 155-64). 5 Ibid., pp. 156-57. 6 Eric Kluitenberg, “The Network of Waves”, in Open, no. 11, 2006 (pp. 6-16), p. 9; Barthes makes this same point on p. 156 (op. cit.). 7 Barthes (with reference to Lacan), op. cit., p. 157. 8 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (3 version 1939), in Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (1955), Schocken Books, 1968 (pp. 217-51), p. 220. 9 Ibid., p. 223. 10 As he defines it both in relation to art documentation (in “Biopolitics”, p. 53) and in relation to digitalization (in “Digitalization”, p. 84). 11 Groys, “Biopolitics”, p. 54; Benjamin also ascribes art to life in the sense that art originally was part of a ritual. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 223.
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If the original artwork is hidden and has a quality of being ‘now-absent real present’12 then the art documentation is a sort of visibly present, non-auratic, dead and accessible image. Unlike the traditional work of art, the art documentation can exist in ‘hybrid spaces’13: In its fluent and flexible insubstantiality, it can enter virtual arenas, just as it can hang on a museum wall. In a virtual ‘space of flows’14 it can scamper around amongst other types of reproductive images.
The invisible living original and the dead piece of visible documentation Defined along the lethal lines of reproductions, the art documentation lacks any kind of signified content. Instead (using the apocalyptic metaphor applied by Groys), it only exists like an empty shell, a hollowed-out signifier on stand by, like a 24-7 escort service to be called out to meet the beholder in his or her own particular situation.15 The art documentation can come to us at any time, anywhere. As mentioned, the original work, or art event, that the art documentation documents, is inaccessible and hidden. This is what gives it its mysterious aura. Our limited access to the signified original can only happen through the visual documentation of it. In Groys’ theory on digitalization, he states that the original data, or image file, is invisible for the human eye, just like the Invisible God is it in a religious context. 16 In religion there is One true invisible and hidden God, but this God can be visualized in various iconic depictions. In the relation between digital images and their image file, the original digital - the file of digital data 17 - is singular and invisible but can likewise be visualized in different types of digital images –depending on the writing of the image, that is, the way of digitalization.18 Likewise in art documentation, there is the original artistic activity that is now absent but has gained visual form through its reproduced 12
Benjamin, op. cit., p. 220, 225; H. Ritter, “Toward the Artwork Essay, Second Version”, in Gumbrich and Merrinan (eds.), Mapping Benjamin, Standford University Press, 2003 (pp. 203-210), p. 204; Hennion and Latour, “How to make mistakes on do many things at once –and become famous for it”, in Gumbrich and Merrinan (eds.), Mapping Benjamin, Standford University Press, 2003 (pp. 91-97), p. 92. 13 Kluitenberg, op. cit., p. 8. 14 Ibid., p. 9. 15 Benjamin, op. cit., p. 221. 16 Boris Groys, “From Image to Image file –and Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization”, in Art Power, MIT Press, 2008 (pp. 83-91). 17 Ibid., p. 86. 18 Ibid., pp. 86-87.
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documentations. To sum up: whether one is speaking about an invisible God, an invisible image file, an invisible art event, or any other invisible Idea for that matter, whatever is invisible, manifests itself in the visible world in various ways - in various images. The idea, so far, is the Groys –ian logic and religious metaphor (that seems to be applicable to a number of different concepts) of an absent original transported into decoded visible copies.19 To close this chain of associations of invisible and visible phenomena that I have engaged in above, I will briefly return more specifically to the concept of art documentation. This I will do within the frame of discourse applied so far – a discourse that decomposes and deconstructs the unified concept [art documentation] into two separate ones: [art] and [documentation]. This segregation renders documentation as the binary opposition of art, the latter resembling the original, the former resembling the copy. 20
The “art” and the “documentation” of art-documentation In relation to art documentation, the artistic event (the “art-part” of art documentation) is extremely temporal and ‘space of place’ specific. Therefore it can be ascribed similar features that Benjamin ascribes to an original work of art: it is absent, auratic, ritualistic and authentic. It is this invisible irreversible original that the documentation portrays. The documentation is produced for the purpose of exhibiting and mediating the original event to the public. Therefore the “documentation-part” of art documentation has lots of exhibition-value but no cult-value or aura. 21 The “documentation-part” of art documentation is not only in-authentic in that respect, worse; ascribed the features of a reproduction, it is not even an art work in its own right with the value to be exhibited as art. Nevertheless art documentation is exhibited in museums just like it is available anywhere else and on the internet as reproductions. The question is who comes first? With art documentation it is easy to get confused about what part of the phenomenon is 19
Groys, “Digitalization”, p. 84. Here I am transferring the concept of art documentation to Groys’ initial idea of original and copy, as presented in idem., “Digitalization”, pp. 84-85 (with the reservation that he ends up rendering the copy as the performed original). 21 Exhibition-value, cult-value and aura: Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 221-225. 20
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more original and more authentic than the other. If we accept what Groys told us; that the exhibited art documentation is non-art but merely refers to art, then this solves how we are to relate to museum exhibited art documentation-pieces (taken that we discover that it is in fact a piece of documentation before we start contemplating it as an autonomous work of art). But how are we to address the art documentation that is accessible in eternal numbers in the virtual ‘space of flows’? Is that a reproduction of the documentation that is exhibited on the museum wall – which makes it a third version, or stage, of the original event?22 Or does it have the same direct reference to the original art event as the exhibited (non-art)documentation does?
Art documentation designed to be exhibited It is not all art documentation that is exhibited with the sole purpose of reference. The type of art documentation discussed so far has a ‘weak identity’ as non-art; an empty signifier.23 But as I will return to in the next section, the art institution adapts, and in that way art documentation can also be made as art. Benjamin noticed how “Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” changed the value of art from ritualistic to exhibition-oriented. 24 With the technology to reproduce technically an original, he observed how the nature of the work of art changed into being designed for reproducibility, while emancipating itself from its parasitical dependence on ritual. 25 This same value change can also be observed in museum exhibited art documentation, where art documentation gets produced for the purpose of being exhibited, or other types
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Here I am thinking along the lines of the Lotte Phillipsen's big scheme of 'stages of art in different art forms': <http://artandauthenticity.wikidot.com/ > 23 The notion of ‘weak identity’ is borrowed from Groys’ differentiation between image file and image: The first has a strong identity; the second has a weak identity (because it is changeable and not unique). Idem., in “Digitalization”, p. x; if image is equivalent to copy and image file is equivalent to original, see also Hennion and Latour (op. cit.) with reference to Benjamin: ‘ (…) any copy is a weak counterfeit of the original’ (italics mine), p. 93. 24 Citation refers to the original title (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit“). Thus the direct translation of the official “Mechanical Reproduction“ would be ”Technical Reproduction“. Lecture by Lotte Phillipsen, “The Artwork Essay”, 10 February 2010. 25 Benjamin, op. cit., p. 224. Note that Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a ‘thesis about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production’ (p. 218).
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of works starts to dissimulate the art-category of art documentation.26 When art documentation is designed to become art, this changes it from non-art into a work of art, a closed self-referential unity, whose signifier points right back at its own ego, its signified. Does this not make the artistic event that the documentation refers to oblivious, equivalent to death rather than life, a bi-product of the “original” or true work: the documentation? Works of art adapt and dissimulate other (art) phenomena within as well as outside of its on domain. In this way a work of art might adapt the characteristics of art documentations, dissimulate it, when really being a work in its own right. In the following I would like to give an example of a “work of art documentation”, as we might call it, that does not refer to any art-event at all, and whose documentation has been assembled for exhibitive purposes only.
The “Work of Art –documentation” In the line of Peter Bürger, the art institution has grown into an unshakable all-eating giant, absorbing, consuming and digesting anti-art as art, waiting for the next new avantgardistic attack only to convert it into an exemplary work of art.27 Inside the museum, in the intestinal system of the art institution, we are used to encountering all these different art forms. This is because we uncritically have accepted that whatever hangs on the museum wall, or otherwise is located in the exhibition room of the museum, is art. We are used to encountering works of art that do not posses the traditional “workqualities” as described previously in this paper. We are fully prepared that the works of art are not finished and “closed”, but “open-ended”, conceptual or whatever. Our expanded field of tolerance as to what is art and what is not, and our way of categorizing all exhibited images as art, is probably the reason why (as stated in the introduction) that we may easily contemplate art documentation as a work of art –even though, as Groys
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Dissimulate means to pretend, but to such an extend that the pretender convinces himself and produces the symptoms of what he is pretending. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), University of Michigan Press, 1994 (pp. 1-7; 12-14; 19-27), p. 3. 27 The art institution was never stormed. Rather it adopted, converted and aesthetizised what was initially considered as inconoclastic anti-art, into Art. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avantgarde, University of Minnesota, 1984, (pp. 41.54), pp. 52-53.
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says, the documentation itself is non-art.28 A side effect of this is that the art itself adjusts to the situation: non-art produces itself as art. The work “Mand: en fantomtegning” (Man: a phantom drawing) is a different kind of art documentation than the biopolitical ones that Groys addresses. It is the kind that doesn’t really refer to anything but itself. Thus it becomes a work of art. The artwork is a poster-sized phantom drawing currently exhibited at the Spring exhibition in the Aarhus Art Building29(see bilag). The drawing is executed by the police department’s phantomdrawer, based on statistic materials collected by Pugholm (the artist): an amount of approximately 7.800 adjectives that can be attributed to physical features that one might associate to the word “man” has been assembled to out-crystallize a frequency of “hits” amongst the adjectives. In this way, the most popular adjectives have been visualized into a phantomic image of: man. 30 This visualization is the result of the random people’s conceptive idea of a man. In semiotic terms, the adverbial hits have been used to constitute a collective signifié,31 gathered on the basis of the participants’ psychological nuances of their idea of the physiognomic looks of man into a total sum, the visualized “hit-man”. The image is a simulacrum of the 2nd order:32 even though man of course exists, the phantom “hit-man” is fictive and does not resemble any signified reality. The phantom man is not real, but exists only as the visualization of invisible ideas from 130 random people. (Therefore might have been visualized differently, had the adjectives been collected elsewhere; as the idea, or signifié, of man, surely has numerous psychological, cultural, generational etc. variations). The signifié of each individual has been fused into forming a visible sign, otherwise hidden. In this work there is no ‘now-absent real presence’ of an original. The assembled documentation is the artwork. Without the phantom drawing, the original idea of how a man looks doesn’t exist as a valid sign. This is an example of how documentation cannot
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Groys, “Biopolitics”, p. 53. Spring, Aarhus Art Building, March 28 to May 2, 2010. The phantom drawing is part of Pugholms installation “Mand nok, Nok mand” (Man enough, Enough man). 30 The material used: a questionnaire, a frequency of words (such as oval, wrinkled, suntanned etc.) and a participants statistics is available for visitors, alongside a reproduction of the phantom drawing. See bilag. 31 A signifié is sign from the Saussurian semiology. For a simple reading in Danish, see e.g. Søren Kjørup, Menneskevidenskaberne, 2 version, Humanistiske Foskningstraditioner, Roskilde Universitetsforlag, 2008; 1 edn. 1996, pp. 44-47 and 50-51. 32 Baudrillard, op. cit., p. 6. 29
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only function as a work of art, but also visualize the invisible, function as the “art-part” of art documentation, and give life, not death, to something that otherwise never would have existed in a visual form.
Who kills who? According to Groys art is identical to life. It is an activity and a process that dies when presented and displayed as an artwork, as the end result of life. In a comparable way, Baudrillard points to the murderous role of science: when something is discovered (like an ingenious people) it dies. ‘In order for ethnology to live, its object must die.’33 Foucault remarks that a work has license to kill its author,34 while with Benjamin the reproduction has the murderous potential to kill the aura. 35Yet another illustrating example is story of “The Oval Portrait” (1850) by Edgar Allan Poe, where as the portrait is painted it gradually extracts the life of the woman portrayed, who in the end dies as the painting comes alive. H.C. Andersen’s “The Shadow” (1847) also continuously competes with its master about who is more alive. In relation to these examples and the topic of art documentation, the visualized documentation has killed the original –given that the original is identical to life. Ritter points to how reproductions do not kill but heal the aura of the work of art. They activate the auratic status of the original artwork, increase its authenticity and can even lead into a cult of the original.36 Drawing a line to religion, like Groys does, one might say it is the bible that activates the religion. Without the bible, it becomes highly difficult to point at the invisible God not being able to refer to how that invisible God has manifested itself in different visible events and images. Likewise with art documentation it is the documented visible image that activates the original event, for without the visible image, one wouldn’t know that the event even existed. Similarly in Groys’ reading of image versus image file: how does the image file even matter if it cannot be visualized in different images? 33
Ibid., p. 7. (speaking about literary works). Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”, in Preziosi (ed.), The Art of Art History, Oxford University Press, 1998 (pp. 299-314), p. 301. 35 This somewhat exaggerated way of wording is mine. Nevertheless, for Benjamin ‘(…) the aura becomes a Lost Paradise,’ with technical reproduction. Hennion and Latour, op. cit., e.g., p. 92. 36 H. Ritter, op. cit., p. 204-205. 34
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In a postmodernist manner of speaking, it can be questioned whether there is an original of anything at all. All there is, is texts, that is; documentations. The author is dead; he took the big original work and stories, such as the Biblical one with him in his downfall. What lives, or what this death gave birth to were the multiple texts, images, documents and readers.37 In this respect, the art documentation is pure simulation: It is all that there is – it has become the reality; the map covering the territory,38 without which the concept of territory wouldn’t exist. What is pointed to here it that the story can be flipped. The art documentation, the image generated by the data, the biblical narrative can be considered as the living activation that makes the original (art event, image file, God) exist, be unique and full of aura. This is not a story of the ugly duckling that became a beautiful swan, it is simply the pointing out that the one presupposes the other: The swan wouldn’t exist without the ugly duckling, just as the art event doesn’t exist without the documentation of it. Kill the copy and you have killed the original, one might argue. Thus, art documentation can bring alive, rather then murder.
The End As suggested in the introduction I do not propose a solution to my reflections. A democratic conclusion might be that that art documentation and the art event documented (like signifier and signified) equally activates each other. Maybe that is how we should read the relationship between art and art documentation. Without the one – the other wouldn’t exist.
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These are all ‘famous’ postmodern sayings. See e.g. Foucault, op. cit.; Barthes, op. cit.; and Barthes, “Death of the Author”, in idem., Image, Music, Text (1977), Noonday Press, 1998. 38 Baudrillard, op. cit., p. 1.
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Niels Kjær Pugholm: “Mand: en fantomtegning” (Man: a phantomdrawing), at Spring, Aarhus Art Bulding, March 28 – May 2, 2010.
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