One of my committee members chuckled upon taking hold of my final dissertation manuscript. "Another doorstop," she said. Final number of pages=309, spacing=1.5, images=too many to count, character=not replicable online.

Below you can partake of the Introduction. Beyond that, the tome is available via Interlibrary Loan. The 5th chapter consists entirely of transparencies--the objecthood of the text was a primary preoccupation.

Introduction

What kind of history is appropriate to performance art, what is the relationship of this history to other art historical methods, and is it applicable to other artworks? This is the underlying question that motivates my dissertation. I propose an answer to this question by engaging a detailed investigation of one artwork, a 1988 performance by Marina Abramovic and Ulay entitled The Lovers.

While such a specific focus might appear to limit my research, in this case it is an important directive. I use one artwork to contain my investigation; to provide one point of reference for a variety of historical and theoretical treatments. And I use this artwork because it is a particularly generative one. It embodies conditions that suggest a different kind of historical attention: It is no longer extant, its historical presence is dependent upon photographs and words, it occupies a landscape, it traces a prominent ancient ruin in a foreign (and largely inaccessible) country, it requires international mediation, it is made with and by bodies, it represents a reunion and a departure, its components include memory, time, ritual and endurance. It invites methodological inquiry as much as it problematizes historical attention to artworks that are not dimensionally finite.

In order to write a history for The Lovers, it is impossible to rely on only one of the three primary methods used by art history. Traditional art history uses archival research and comparative techniques, but this approach is insufficient in the face of artworks that are largely experiential. The objects and photographs that make up performance art archives do not represent it so much as offer a substitute body for an art form that has none. These archives, by their very existence, attempt to stabilize what is inherently unstable about performance art. They can only supply a ceremonial foundation for, not an extension of, the understanding of such works. An entirely theoretical treatment of performance art de-emphasizes its historical (and other) particularities. It is important to provide a context for performance art, for its preoccupation with the body as a medium and its renunciation of other, more traditional, artistic activities. Theoretical writing is also often concerned with its own methodological revelation, and while I am certainly offering a methodological critique by proposing an alternative historical method, the subject of my dissertation is not methodology itself. A narrative-based account of the piece privileges its status as a story, not its historical consequence as an artwork. While The Lovers does have epic proportions, a novel would be more suited to their description.

I am interested in the way the documents of The Lovers represent it, what theory can expose about it, and how narrative can inspire poetic texts around it. While there are many historians who have combined archival research, theory and narrative, I know of few who have allowed their subject to determine the character of that combination, unless their subject is textuality itself.1 If The Lovers is the primary subject of my dissertation (subject: material or essential substance; a department of knowledge; one that is acted upon), the object of my dissertation is the formation of this subject (object: something that is or is capable of being sensed; something physical or mental of which a subject is cognitively aware; an end toward which effort or action or emotion is directed.)

My approach assumes that the meaning of an artwork is not located only in certain facts about it, but also in the variety and extent of the responses it engenders. I have chosen to focus on a performance because it is an artwork that no longer exists, and because of this its place in history is not claimed by its physicality but by a set of documents that are understood to record it. These documents--photographs, memories and descriptions--are once removed from the work in question. Interpretations of these documents are twice removed, and the text that includes or organizes them moves yet another step away from the "original" artwork. I accept this scenario of distances, and use it to construct a narrative that is comfortable telling a history in something akin to a novelistic voice.

The distinction between text and object is intentionally blurred. Rather than producing a text that is meant to explain an object, I am proposing a text that demonstrates how the writing of a text is itself an exercise in object-making. I start only with the documents of The Lovers. By the final pages of my dissertation, I have to some extent re-performed Ulay and Abramovic's piece. This action undermines an historical attitude that the role of history is to exhume extant stories and arrange their certainties in a recognizable form. I presume that history is something that is made, and that the historical contribution of any text is as dependent on its subject as on the attitude that is taken toward it. In this way, an author's contribution is itself understood to constitute a kind of history.

My approach is appropriate to certain, not all, artworks. Those artworks that are historically ephemeral, that include temporality as an expressive component, are more open to a history of re-invention than those that maintain a solid physical link to the world. Land art (affected by erosion, atmospheric, climatological, geographical conditions and contextualized by landscape), happenings, time-determined art (work left in nature or made of impermanent materials), works that use absence as a way of signifying presence (Giacometti's sculptures) or that are themselves representational critiques (Las Meninas), works that cross media boundaries, works that no longer exist or are only partially complete and those that achieve iconic status invite this kind of treatment. Those works that are physically circumscribed, highly illustrative, documented via preparatory sketches, artist letters, acquisition histories, artistic responses and conservator's observations are less likely to sustain such an examination. Their historical effect rotates around more concrete evidence, and this evidence always points back to their objecthood and the reasons they look the way they do.

Performing History is composed of a series of actions I take in relation to Ulay and Abramovic's work that illustrate its mutability in the face of historical narrative. My investigation exposes the multiple worlds of The Lovers while it also documents how historical interpretation eventually re-makes that work. The actions I take relative to The Lovers depend on an acknowledgment, not of its historical domain, but of its historical range. These appear as chapters loosely structured around six revisionary ratios introduced by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence.2 Bloom's ratios allow me to present and re-present the work in sequentially ordered degrees that also share the work's historical instability. Each chapter is a development of the one that precedes it. My operations apply to the absent work, its reenactment, the works that describe and interpret it, and my account of it as well. What I hope to achieve is a text as generative as the performance that inspires it and that is its subject, a history that is attuned to its own weaknesses in the aim of expanding its underutilized theoretical and poetic potential. The dissertation should act in deconstructive and structuralist terms at once. While the format of the beast acknowledges implicitly language’s inability to wholly signify, history’s lack of a single truth, an object’s multiple landscapes, it also recognizes and creates a recognizable form--a finite thing-in-the-world--in the midst of these mutations and possibilities. The opposition between the physical and noumenal worlds is not an intersection that yields solution so much as fuel for the writing. Throughout, The Lovers assumes different postures, and by the end it has been scrutinized, stretched, analyzed and embellished so that it resembles but does not mirror its original appearance.

My dissertation is grounded in the historical life of one artwork. Part of my research is devoted to an exposition of that life, specifically and contextually. Another part of my research is methodologically oriented. It seeks information about the making of history and the character of texts and puts relevant discoveries to work on the artwork in question.
The texts I consult fall into two categories: those that inform the overall structure and style of the dissertation and those that are particular to the concerns of each chapter. I have already indicated the influence of Harold Bloom on the chapter divisions. I employ Bloom's work not out of a desire to identify myself with him but because the categories he offers are relevant to the project at hand. They are specific to issues of formation (how one work causes or makes another) and to the character of criticism. Alongside Bloom stands a group of authors who have written extensively about the nature of history and the problems of wearing the historical or authorial hat.

Stylistically, the influence of Roland Barthes is most tangible, both in terms of my allegiance and my structural and poetic points of view. Barthes' S/Z is an essential resource.3 Barthes' method, to "star" a given text so that the reader's responses to it are understood to form another text, is something I wish to extend. I treat The Lovers as the "text" to be starred. Rather than allowing the text that is generated (the starred text) to remain a set of formally disconnected thoughts, as Barthes does, I put these discontinuities back into a generative narrative. They become integral to it but no longer represent their own means of formation when they appear.

Relative to those authors who write about performance art or performance-related art, I am rejecting the tendency to chronologically or typologically represent this work. The historical relevance of performance art cannot be located through a timeline, a set of categories, or semantic arguments. A text like Henry Sayre's The Object of Performance introduces various performances, describes their components, context and precedents, and categorizes them relative to certain terms (framing, staging, chance.)4 Yet the sense of the works as performances is almost entirely lost in his text . He writes with a confidence in their historical solidity, and refers to documents about them as if they are the works themselves. In his desire to fully explain these works to his readers, Sayre fails to contribute much about the complexity of their experience. While Sayre indicates in his introduction that his subject demands a different kind of history and recognizes contemporary criticism as a performance in its own right, his text never capitalizes on this observation.
Various anthologies of performance art actually present a far better overview of performance art than does a text like Sayre's. While many of them also rely on explanatory and descriptive methods, their approach does not imply the same kind of objectivity. An anthology allows more space for a reader to navigate through various performances, to make his or her analogies and comparisons without the assistance of what pretends to be a historically accurate route. This is an important element for a text about an artform that implies both freedom for and commitment from its audiences. However, most anthologies operate within a system that makes history out of factual accumulation. I am aiming for a history guided, not by compilation, but by a specific analysis that leads to a plural text.

There are two contemporary authors whose work on performance art is formative for my own. Both are art historians and performance artists at once, and both use alternative research methods to elucidate the historical nature of performance art. Kathy O'Dell considers the actual or implied contract between performer and audience in masochistic performances. Kristine Stiles writes about performance from a sociological perspective, considering the repeated performance of everyday activities by focusing on the language of the body and issues of gender identity. It is no mistake that I identify with these historians who are also performers in their own right. With my dissertation, I am willfully undermining the stereotypical barriers (historical and present) that exist between those who think and those who make, those who do and those who talk. My proposal is interdisciplinary in conception and form. If its position relative to art history is an unorthodox one, it benefits from ways of looking that are familiar to other areas.

Chapter 1
Clinamen ("poetic misreading" whereby "a poet swerves away from his precursor."5)

This chapter is devoted to an exposition of the historical space occupied by Ulay and Abramovic's work. I consider the precedents for performance art and its position relative to other media. A clinamen is executed in this chapter through a series of historical correctives whereby extant analyses are analyzed and where necessary, revised. The Lovers is recontextualized. Since the first chapter sets the historical stage for Ulay and Abramovic's performance, I consult the increasingly wide array of secondary sources that position performance art in the annals of art history as well as those primary sources that enumerate the attitudes of particular performers and their audiences towards this type of art-making. This is a chapter that is proof of a kind of seeing, aiming at an exhaustive (but impossible) vision of ideas that have come to constitute performance art’s history up to this point.

Chapter 2
Tessera ("completion and antithesis...a poet antithetically 'completes' his precursor."6)

The Lovers is considered as a set of documents. Critical and interpretive responses are catalogued. First-hand accounts and journalistic reports that describe the performance are scrutinized. Images that stand in for the piece are analyzed in their representational and narrative roles. All provide grounds for argument. As formative sources, they are extended, altered or eliminated. The intention, experience and sequence of The Lovers is mapped and redrawn. A new documentation set evolves that changes, but depends upon, the original one. The second chapter thoroughly documents the representation of The Lovers. Texts and photographs that describe the performance are thoroughly analyzed. The Lovers generated a moderate amount of critical attention, and I rely especially on the writing of Thomas McEvilley who traveled with Ulay and Abramovic to China and who has written about them on numerous occasions in a thorough and perceptive manner.

Chapter 3
Kenosis ("a breaking device similar to the defence mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition compulsions...the later poet...seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor's poem...that the precursor is emptied out also."7)

In this chapter, the stability of Ulay and Abramovic's work is at risk for the first time. The Lovers no longer appears as a circumscribed artwork but as a series of facts and fictions. The performance presents itself as an occasion for storytelling. The stories that emerge may originate at first within the performance, but soon extend far beyond it. Because The Lovers is primarily positioned in terms of the relationship between Ulay and Abramovic, tales about the performers and their collaboration are highlighted.

Chapter 4
Daemonization ("a movement towards a personal Counter-Sublime, in reaction to the precursor's Sublime...The later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond the precursor."8)

The Lovers is grounded in the physical, cultural and experiential landscapes of the Great Wall and of China. The Great Wall of China is thoroughly mapped. Those places that spatially support, delineate and describe the piece are discovered and recorded. I re-walk the wall, marking the route traveled while also allowing divergence from this route. The chapter should read like a time warp travel guide--it is punctuated by maps, images, tales and memories. Present, past and future are not always distinguishable. The chapter is written in a number of voices that compete to describe the route traversed by Ulay and Abramovic. These voices include those of the performers, the author, travel guide writers, historians, sinologists, art critics, photographers and map makers. They are distinct in graphic terms though they work together to create a more detailed account of walking the Great Wall than any of them achieve on their own. In this chapter The Lovers is forced into a physical proximity with other actions, events and recollections that record the Great Wall and its environs. Typography and graphics compete, font and scale changes are utilized to register emphases and shadows in the landscape of the piece and the resultant text.

Chapter 5
Askesis ("a movement of self-purgation which intends the attainment of a state of solitude...the later poet...yields up a part of his own human and imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from others...the precursor's endowment is also truncated."9)

Chapter five is a chapter of "topoanalysis" and "oneirism," both terms introduced by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. Bachelard defines topoanalysis as "the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives"10 whereas oneirism is the reading and writing of a place of memory.11 I utilize Bachelard’s terms to construct visual traces that suggest the physical and psychological realms of The Lovers. The voyeurism inspired by the performance is engaged. I move away from specific analyses towards tracing the work's effect, and (in phenomenological terms) its essence. The Lovers gains range and notational possibility, it revels in the coexistence of body and structure, boundary and vista, it announces itself in silhouettes, shadows, solids and voids. Its indexical character emerges.

Chapter 6 (Conclusion)
Apophrades ("the return of the dead...the uncanny effect is that the new poem's achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor's characteristic work."12)

My final chapter addresses the ghosts of the manuscript--those ideas and questions that remain hovering and unresolved. I present these as a series of juxtaposed notations, distinguished in character and direction with symbols from the dance notation of Rudolf Laban.

Introduction Notes

1 Kristine Stiles was kind enough to send me a copy of her book entitled Questions: 1977-1982, a book she called an example of Òart literature.Ó In a letter to me, Stiles indicated that she wrote about her work as an artist/historian and about how a text can reflect the work under consideration in Questions. See Kristine Stiles, Questions: 1977-1982 (San Francisco: Kronoscope Press, 1982).

2 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

3 Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).

4 Henry Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

5 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 14.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., 14-15.

8 Ibid., 15.

9 Ibid.

10 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 8.

11 Ibid., 14.

12 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 15.