In general, essential properties of performance and archives are considered to be at odds with each other because performance stands on the basis of one-off presence, while archives guard stable and permanent preservation against disappearing. The postproduction of live
performances such as film, photography, and texts cannot guarantee to deliver their whole liveness or the improvisational elements of the site. The archival residues of documenting performances may also be fragmented, deactivated, or mispresented. Above all, no performance is ever identical to the previous one, although it is repeated based on pre-written scripts. It is, so to speak, repeated as differences each time. With regard to this, Peggy Phelan, in her renowned chapter “The Ontology of Performance”, claims:
Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of
representations of representations: once it does, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, […] becomes itself through disappearance.8 For Phelan, the strength of performance lies in its disappearance and its inability to be reproduced. Rebecca Schneider also discusses this antithetical relationship between the ephemerality of live performance and the reproduction of its archival residue. Referring to Phelan’s insights, Schneider wonders if the given logic of archives actually demands the disappearance of performance and continues to question in the following manner: “If we consider performance as of disappearance, of an ephemerality read as vanishment and loss, are we perhaps limiting ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by our cultural habituation to the logic of the archive?”9 Indeed, the archive in modernity is a political and legislative space where certain normative logic and controlling power can be operated like
8 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 146.
9 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, London and New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 98.
imperialism, as I have examined earlier. Her question, thus, implies that other means or forms of ruminating events or knowledge produced by performances could be possible, which is unlikely to be containable in the “ocularcentric”10 archive. Schneider suggests that performance should be approached as “the act of remaining and a means of re-appearance and
‘reparticipation’ [original emphasis]”.11 For Schneider, archival remains of performance can be re-enacted and can reappear again and again through repetition of bodily acts, rather than
through the demand for visible materiality.12 With emphasis on the “body-to-body transmission” of performative residues, she critically reminds us that the archive is already built upon the premise of absence and disappearance. Schneider states, “Indeed, [archival] remains become themselves through disappearance as well”.13 Her idea sits well with my arguments referring to Derrida in Chapter 2 – i.e. the archive itself already denotes a sense of loss, death, and oblivion of being and memory from the past. In particular, much Sisyphean archival art has
demonstrated that the archive can only function as an index of memory and cannot be the past per se; its pathological desire for marked origins is absent. Just as Derrida diagnoses that this archival sickness for finding origins is a doomed hope, Schneider also criticises the logic of archives that is trapped in this ideal myth of all remains marked as the sameness of originals.14 For her, performance rather “remains differently” than simply disappears.15 In this regard, Schneider writes:
In this sense performance becomes itself through messy and eruptive re- appearance. It challenges, via the performative trace, any neat antimony between appearance and disappearance, or presence and absence through the basic repetitions that mark performance as indiscreet, non-original, relentlessly citational, and remaining.16
10 Ibid., p. 101. 11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., p. 102 and p. 107. Schneider refers to Diana Taylor’s concept of “repertoire” when explaining repeatable behaviours of bodily acts with the archive. See Diana Taylor, The Archive and The Repertoire: Performing Cultural
Memory in the Americas, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
13 Schneider, op. cit., p. 100 and p. 102. 14 Ibid., pp. 99-100.
15 Ibid., p. 105. 16 Ibid., p. 102.
To put it in another way, the performative readings of archives, memory, and history by means of enactment as repetition and reconstruction (as difference) can challenge the ways in which the past is accessed and historical knowledge is generated. In Schneider’s sense that
“performance remains differently”, I argue that performance uses or activates existing archival residues of visual materiality differently as well. In doing so, the oppositional boundaries between performance and archives can be intertwined. The Sisyphean archival art that I shall introduce utilises or animates a performance’s disappearing and re-appearing by virtue of staging failure. The archive then becomes a space of performance activated through repetition and failure, suggesting alternative ways of reconfiguring the habitual operation and visual dominance of archives. Sisyphean artists’ performative encounters in and with the realm of archives become a dynamic site of unpredictable new relations and creativity as well as a site of resistance to the fetishistic pursuit of success and perfectionism.