Output details

Performing the Archive : Portfolio

DESCRIPTION

This double-weighted portfolio represents the multimodal outputs that emerged from the three-year fellowship, Performing the Archive, and the follow-on project, Performing Documents. The outputs included are interrelated and address the same enquiry, exploring performance archiving, strategies for creative re-use of documents and re-enactment. The project integrated practice-as-research and scholarly approaches, producing art works and curated exhibitions, alongside critically reflexive articles and book chapters.

Contribution: Practice was predominantly conceived and carried out by Clarke collaboratively, with the art collective Performance Re-enactment Society. Texts were single authored. [See portfolio for credits and list of outputs included.]

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1. What is the role of remaking, re-using and re-performing in understanding art history and doing historiography?

How can:

2. performance practices advance and disseminate understandings of material held by arts archives?

3. documents of past performances be used to inspire new work?

4. performances and temporary exhibitions remain, how is the knowledge they produce passed on between generations? What is the role of audience memory in the afterlife of immaterial cultural events?

5. performance and performative means be used in curatorial practice?

APPROACHES AND CONTEXT

Archives are conventionally used by theatre or art historians, who read documents as evidence of past events, to support the writing of histories. This research explored various uses of documents in practice-as-research, addressing the relationship of the archive to the future rather than the past of creative practice. The project produced insights into the relationship between performance and the archive, developing new models for reusing documents in performance-making and exhibition curating. By bringing together artistic and scholarly approaches, Performing the Archive contributes to current debates around re-enactment and re-use.

DISSEMINATION

Through performances, installations and gallery exhibitions, publication of findings as journal articles and book chapters, papers at key conferences; DVD and photographic documentation. [See portfolio for details.]

The portfolio represents the multimodal outputs emerging from Performing the Archive, (2007-10) and Performing Documents (2011-14). During the REF period the majority of Clarke’s research has been on this extended enquiry. The publications, performance and exhibition draw on diverse methodologies which have been tested through extensive research into existing literature, theories and practices, archival study, practice-as-research and scholarly writing. The two book chapters and papers develop research previously presented as academic papers, use the exhibition and performance outcomes as case studies and discuss these discursively. The quantity of work involved exceeds that required to produce two normal outputs.