The term "performance" as it is used in the book I referred to is not identical to the term "performance art" à la Laurie Anderson.
Think of it this way: "work" in English means both an action and an object. "I work" vs. "I have a work hanging on my wall." In French, we use "travail" for an action and "oeuvre" or "ouvrage" for an object being the result of the latter.
The point of "Art as Performance" is that when you are appreciating a work of art, you are appreciating "travail" not just "oeuvre." In other words, a painting as a physical object is a gateway to the process of its making, both physical and intellectual. There are many people in aesthetics who reduce an artwork to the sense-data it provides to the viewer, but we all know that there is no such thing as an innocent eye: there is no masterpiece without prior appreciation of where it comes from, even if said appreciation of context is not done in full awareness.
Stephen Shore nowadays refers to photographs as "solving a problem," which is somewhat similar to this view: a full appreciation of a work involves understanding what kind of work-travail was necessary to get there. It's not about intention per se, it's about what was done to get to the result. When we are blown away by a photograph, it's also because we understand the value of what was done to create it.
You can thus account for the value of originality, the technical mastery, but also the thematic strength and the depth of reflection behind a work of art.
So the "process" part of appreciating a photograph is not limited to appreciating the quality of the silver gelatin paper or of the film's fine-grain: it's appreciating as well the intelligence of its maker in producing it, in "solving its problem" to reuse Shore's words. In Ansel Adams's terminology, it would amount to appreciating not only the surface of the finished print, not only the darkroom work, but also the process of (pre)visualization.
Look at the way we criticize photos: "a good idea but poorly executed," "a cliché," "a profound work of daring originality," etc. All these comments do not point to a physical object: they point to the actions that somebody did! |