AHCS Speaker Series: Philip Auslander "Reactivations: Toward a Hermeneutics of Performance Documentation"
The Department of Art History and Communication Studies welcomes , Professor, School of Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology, to speak at our annual lecture series (follow this link for a complete list of this year's speakers).
Title: "Reactivations: Toward a Hermeneutics of Performance Documentation"
Abstract: I seek to develop a theory of performance documentation focusing on the audience's phenomenological relationship to the performance document rather than the document's ontological relationship to the original performance. No documented piece is performed solely as an end in itself: the performance is always at one level raw material for documentation, the final product through which it will be circulated and with which it will inevitably become identified. Over time, the documentary image turns into the historical truth of the original event. If performances are made to be documented and are constituted through documentation, and the original performance is not definitive but is inevitably replaced by its representations, the spectator鈥檚 primary action with respect to performance art is not the witnessing of live events but the imaginative reconstitution of performances from images, whether held in memory or available through documentation. I draw on the hermeneutics of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer who argues that understanding something does not consist of revealing an objective truth inherent in it, waiting to be discovered. Rather, 鈥渦nderstanding proves to be an event鈥� (Gadamer) something that emerges through dialogue, this case the dialogue between the performance document and its audience. In this sense, our imaginative recreation of a performance from its documentation is not a process of retrieving information about something that took place in the past but is itself a performance in the present, in which we take part.
Biography: Philip Auslander's primary research interest is in performance, especially in relation to music, media, and technology. He has written on aesthetic and cultural performances as diverse as theatre, performance art, music, stand-up comedy, robotic performance, and courtroom procedures. He is the author of five books and editor or co-editor of two collections. His most recently published books are Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (2006) and the second edition of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2008).