Workshop Overview (NSCAD, Saturday March 3)

The conservation of live art works and their documents continues to challenge art historians, archivists and conservationist. Performance theorist, Peggy Phelan, has argued that performance art is best left without a trace in order to preserve its original and authentic expression in memory. Others, like Philip Auslander have suggested that witnessing the live event is not necessary given the proliferation of live art documents that regenerate and proliferate affective qualities. Both theorists posit ontological priority of either the live art event as a privileged moment, or the document as the site that evokes liveness. I propose that how we encounter the document is as crucial to the event as the event is to the document. This relation can be seen, not as a sequential movement between event and document or document and event, but as a continuing dynamic that is evoked through the encounter with the audience of the future.

This raises some pertinent questions that implicate all contemporary artists. If we consider encounters with the live event and its documents as creative and dynamic, then perhaps artists may need to now consider how conservation and the memory of the live work and its documents speak to audiences of the past and future. If this encounter is a major creative extension of the work, as I am suggesting, then are artists now to become conservationists and archivist of their work, or are “professional intermediaries involved in such conservation practices (like curators, museum archivists, librarians) the new intermediary artists of the 21st century? And furthermore, this begs the question: why remember live works and their documents, and for whom?

This one day workshop will tackle these concerns and questions through discussion and hands on production of a performative document in the form of an instructional manual.
Participants are invited to create prototypes for new archival platforms to display a performance event created by “the parasite” during the introduction of the workshop. Participants are further invited to imagine this work in the future through various mediated encounters. The intention is to generate ideas on how to extend the life of live event and the document in ways that are not currently utilized. These ideas will reexamine the notion of the archive and classification models used to categorize art works. The key is to imagine new possibilities for encountering documents and the archive that may be structurally impossible, yet potentially desirable. The group may further elect to document the group’s process through the day as a performance onto itself. Together, the group will collaboratively co-author the instructional manual for archivists, artists and interested stakeholders, on how to ( or not) evoke, rather than conserve, the memory of the performance and its documents through encounters with future audiences.

A reading list and/or small course-pack covering issues pertaining to this subject will be provided prior to the workshop.
It is highly recommended that participants attend the artists lecture on February 28, 8pm in the Bell Auditorium (D440) at NSCAD prior to taking the workshop.
The workshop is limited to an enrolment of 8.
The workshop will take place on Saturday, March 3, 2007 10-5:30pm. NSCAD Board room D500.
Contact Joshua Schwebel at piatejosh@yahoo.ca for more info or to sign up.
A 24 hour cancellation notice is required.