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12 Approaches to 12 Shooters

This publication examines Marcia Farquhar’s 12 Shooters - film records of Farquhar’s performance artworks made in collaboration with twelve artist film-makers: Uriel Orlow, Sarah Pucill, Trine Lise Nedreaas, Tal Sterngast, Tom Paine, Nichola Bruce with Rebecca E. Marshall, Gary Stevens, Dryden Goodwin, Jem Finer, Judith Goddard, Andrew Kötting, Saskia Olde Wolbers and Zoe Brown.

12 Shooters approaches from the ‘documentary’ to idiosyncratic works overtly fusing the ideas of Farquhar's performances to the film-makers’ aesthetics. The book documents these collaborations and includes writing by Peter Suchin, Tony Grisoni, Mark Harris and Stuart Brisley. My essay-chapter relates the film series to current and historic debate on the documentation and commodification of live art by touching on notions of lived experience, subjectivities, and the presence of stylistic influence when documenting performance artworks. This writing expands upon my previously-published research with Artwords Press, Tate Liverpool (‘Art, Les and Videotape: Exposing Performance’), lectures on Regina Galindo (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford) and Manuel Vason (Arnolfini, Bristol) and invitations to photographically record works by Lisa Watts and Michael Stevenson.

The volume was reviewed by Deborah Levy: ‘The 12 Shooters book will be of enduring value to generations of artists fortunate enough to get hold of a copy. Entertaining and scholarly, 12 Shooters dismantles the form of most publications that document a distinguished artist’s practice, and elucidates the ways in which a once-only conceptual performance might haunt and possess an entirely new body of work … with the stray thoughts and unexpected philosophical conundrums of everyday lived experience that have always been Farquhar’s subject.’ (Levy, July 2009)