Surrogate Performances: Performance Documentation and the New York Avant-

garde, ca. 196474

Kirbys characterization of fine art performance as essentially a coterie phenomenon that

could have greater reach only through documentation apparently was shared by some
of the artists involved in the production of the performances, including Happenings, that
he covered as a documentarian and editor. Claes Oldenburg, for one, engaged a
photographer, Robert McElroy, to shoot his performances. McElroys photographs
appear both in Kirbys Happenings anthology and Oldenburgs own book Store Days,
published in 1967, which documents Oldenburgs environmental installation The
Store and the Ray Gun Theater performances that took place there, performances that
were also filmed by Raymond Saroff. McElroys photographs are joined in the book by
scripts, texts, and drawings by Oldenburg related to the production of the five
performances that made up Ray Gun Theater. Oldenburg includes the program for these
events, reproduced in facsimile, which makes it clear that each one was performed only
twice, and by a different group of people each time. In a text titled Budget for Theater,
which follows the program in the book and may be a proposal or a funding request (or
perhaps just a statement of purpose by the artist), Oldenburg stresses the small scale of
his operation: These performances would occur one time only with about 35
spectators each time. He also indicates that these performances were not so much
directed at the general public as at other artists and connoisseurs interested in
developments along this line. Nevertheless, it seems that he sought a larger audience
for these coterie performances by documenting them in the book that contains this text.

In arguing for the need to document performances, Kirby looked both to the present and
the future: documentation makes current work accessible to a larger audience and
establishes a record for study in future times. Moreover, he stated: A concern for
tomorrows past is one reason for documentation of contemporary performances. All
current presentations will soon pass into history where they will be completely
unavailable to direct experience. Anyone interested in theatre history should recognize
the importance of documenting significant contemporary works as completely as
possible. It is noteworthy that Kirby refers here to the present as tomorrows past. This
makes it clear that performance documentation was to be addressed primarily to the
future, not the present: it was to be directed to posterity and the historical record more
than to current audiences and publicity. It was a means of making performances
available to future audiences who would have no other access to them. From Kirbys
perspective, the crucial task for performance documentation is to allow the reader of the
performance document to experience the performance itself. Acknowledging that no
information about an experience is the same as the experience itself, he nevertheless
refers at one point to performance documents as creating surrogate
performance[s]. The document, as surrogate, stands in for the original event for an
audience to whom that event is no longer available. In Kirbys version of surrogacy, it is
the responsibility of the document to provide its audience with an experience as close as
possible to that of the original event. This can be accomplished only if the performance
documentarian recognizes that a concern with history demands an accurate and
objective record of the performance. Kirby readily admits that complete objectivity is
impossible, not least because of the inevitable selectivity of any account or image, but
insists that it remains a worthwhile objective: To the extent that a writer consciously
attempts to record rather than to evaluate or interpret, the performance will retain its own
identity and the reader will respond to the documentation in much the same way as he
would have responded to the performance.

Kirbys notion that documentation can deliver something like the same experience as the
original performance goes against the grain of current ways of thinking about
performance documentation, which tend to emphasize the futility of producing an
adequate representation of an original live event. Nevertheless, his claim should be
taken seriously despite its lack of qualification. There is no question but that the
performance document becomes a surrogate for the original performance: we rely on
documentation to provide us with information about performances that we have not seen,
and we take the information to be about the performance, not the document. Many more
recent commentators feel, along with Caroline Rye, that one danger of documenting
ephemeral performances is that the record can all too quickly become a substitute for
the live event it re-presents, a substitute that cannot provide evidence of exactly the thing
it purports to record. As Matthew Reason points out, however, this position is grounded
in a paradox: the evanescence that is said to be the defining characteristic of live
performance is the very thing that prompts performance makers and others to want to
preserve it through documentation. The result is that we demand that performances be
documented while simultaneously disavowing the connection between the document
and the original performance. Although Kirbys approach may be reductive, it avoids this
paradox. Kirby treats performances ephemerality not as its essential defining
characteristic but, rather, as a limiting condition that prevents avant-garde performance
from having larger audiences and greater historical and cultural presence. He implies
that the value of preserving performance for future audiences trumps the value of
respecting its ephemerality.

Kirbys faith in objectivity is also controversial from the current perspective, since we are
now used to thinking of documentary objectivity as chimerical and recordings or
documents as necessarily reflective of their creators biases, if only in terms of what they
include and exclude. It is important, however, to understand that the crucial opposition
for Kirby is not that between objectivity and bias. Rather, it is the dichotomy between two
discursive practices that he sees as opposed: documentation and criticism. In a passage
I quoted above, Kirby contrasts recording performances to evaluating or interpreting
them and strongly favors the former approach over the latter two. As Martin Puchner has
shown, Kirby imposed his desire for a precise, descriptive, and analytical style
on TDR during the period in which he edited it.Indeed, Kirbys call for objectivity in
performance documentation is one manifestation of an implacable hostility toward
criticism, which he identified with evaluation or interpretation, that recurs throughout his
writingin one essay, he refers to theatrical criticism as a kind of intellectual and
emotional fascism that imposes opinions and value judgments on its subjects and
victims. In Criticism: Four Faults, his most sustained statement on the subject, Kirby
dismisses theater criticism as unnecessary, as well as being nave and primitive,
arrogant, and immoral. It should be eliminated. Although Kirby offers detailed arguments
in support of this claim, they need not concern us here. What is important is that he
explicitly contrasts criticism with performance documentation, which he sees as
embracing positive values that are antithetical to those of the critic.
Performance is ephemeral. It disappears from history unless it is recorded and preserved
somehow. Thus, a concern with history demands an accurate and objective record of
the performance. To the extent that the record is complete and detailed, the performance
can be reconstructed mentally. Values will take care of themselves. Since everyone has
values, they will evaluate the historical reconstruction. If they have accurate and
exhaustive information, their evaluation will approximate the evaluation they would have
made of the actual performance if they had been in the audience. But history does not
care whether its data is liked or disliked; it is built only upon the quality and accuracy of
the data itself.

Thus, a fifth and final claim can be made against evaluative criticism: it tends to work
against and obscure vital historical documentation.

Kirbys hostility toward criticism finds support in Susan Sontags well-known essay
Against Interpretation (1964), in which she characterizes criticism as poison[ing] our
sensibilities with an effusion of interpretations. Sontag focuses more on literary
criticism than on the visual arts or performance, but a number of her points anticipate
Kirbys. One of Sontags objections to interpretation is that it makes art into an article for
use rather than something to be appreciated in and for itself. Kirbys definition of art
includes the stipulation that works of art have no objective or functional purpose.

As we have already seen, Kirby shared Sontags distaste for critics who would seek to
impose their views on the work and its audiences. In practice, both favored description
over interpretation or evaluation. Sontag first proposed that critical writing needs to
switch its object of attention from the content of works (which is subject to interpretation)
to their form, for which we need a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary. Still
better, she suggests, would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate,
sharp, loving description of the appearance of works of art. Although it seems unlikely
that Kirby, who often wrote in the detached style of an analytical observer, would have
embraced Sontags call for an erotics of art, it is apparent that both strongly favored a
descriptive approach to writing about art over an interpretive one.