Visual Resources

an international journal on images and their uses

ISSN: 0197-3762 (Print) 1477-2809 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvir20

Documentation as Art Practice in the 1960s

Christian Berger & Jessica Santone

To cite this article: Christian Berger & Jessica Santone (2016) Documentation as Art Practice in
the 1960s, Visual Resources, 32:3-4, 201-209, DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2016.1241030

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2016.1241030

Published online: 28 Nov 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 11623

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 3 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gvir20
INTRODUCTION

Documentation as Art Practice in the 1960s

Christian Berger and Jessica Santone

This issue addresses the practice of documentation in the art of the 1960s. Documentation is
here understood as both the creation of documents and the techniques of their management,
such as collection, archiving, arrangement, contextualization, or manipulation. The texts
included here attend to the political, material, intermedial, and affective dimensions of
documentation through close studies of specific artists and bodies of work. The authors
consider a range of practices in experimental photography, conceptualism, and performance
art, by artists situated in different local or transnational contexts—mostly Europe, North
America, and East Asia. At stake are why and how the processes of making or organizing
documents newly constituted an artistic practice in its own right during the 1960s. Building
on established research on twentieth-century documentary strategies and key 1960s
documents, as well as recent scholarship in media studies and performance studies, the
issue fosters a richer understanding of the personal, political, and social uses of
documentation in the period.
Keywords: Documentation; Archiving; 1960s; Conceptualism; Performance Art; Fluxus;
Photography

In the past 20 years, there has been a surge of interest in documenting, documentation,
and archiving as art practices. Art historians like Hal Foster initially diagnosed “an ar-
chival impulse” in millennial art, symptomatic of a postmodernism that had run its
course, in the relational, referential paradigm of the artist-as-curator and the collection
as object.1 Likewise, documentation has become an essential corollary to ephemeral or
performance practices that have grown steadily in importance—and institutional rec-
ognition—since the mid-twentieth century.2 Artists’ uses of documenting not only
reflect technological changes that have made high-quality recording more readily avail-
able, but also signal the importance of testimony and witnessing at an ever-expanding
number of sites of political tension.3 Within our period of environmental, political, and
technological crises, art historian T.J. Demos sums up the power of these changes when
he argues that artists have “reinvent[ed] the conditions of moving images in the doc-
umentary art of photography, film, and video, that is, images that are globally circulat-
ing and politically affective.”4
Against this backdrop of our present context, we look back in this special issue to
documentation as artistic practice in the 1960s. By “documentation” we mean both the
Visual Resources, Volume 32, Numbers 3–4, September–December 2016
ISSN 0197-3762 © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2016.1241030
202 Berger and Santone

material processes of creating documents and the complex work of assembling sets of
documents, organizing systems of materials, or drawing connections between them. In
our view, this era was pivotal to the changing epistemologies of the document and of
documentation. In the context of these broader changes, artists addressed the problem
of mediation in their work from new angles. The 1960s laid important groundwork for
more contemporary strategies of documentation in terms of both theory and practice.
As the beginning of the information age, this period ushered in new media and new
attitudes about mediation, data, and knowledge. It was also a moment of significant
political change, when in multiple situations globally individual and collective identities
came directly into conflict with oppressive state apparatuses. New global communica-
tions technologies seemed to hold potential to help in these situations, to network
shared experiences of encounter with state power across greater distances. In this
context, many artists made work that engaged with the mundane everyday, with the
embodied experience of the spectator, or with the politically charged critique of insti-
tutions and their discourses; documentation was a core strategy to these ends. The
question of whether the document mediated access to the work of art or was, in
some regard, the work itself would become during the 1960s increasingly fraught
among artists working in conceptual or performative dimensions. As artists generated
more material production around the idea or event seemingly at the core of their
project—process frequently supplanting finished product—it became less and less
clear where and when the artwork stopped and documentation of art began. In the
meantime, modernist problems of the aesthetics, veracity, and politics of documenta-
tion continued to affect artists who explored new forms of mechanical and electronic
reproduction.
At various moments in the twentieth century, the document held particular rele-
vance in art discourse.5 Whether considered in theoretical terms, as in German critic
Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) “Thirteen Theses Against Snobs” (1928), or in terms
of practice, as in Georges Bataille’s (1897–1962) French Surrealist art magazine Docu-
ments (1929–30), the document was frequently summoned in “resistance to the aes-
thetic point of view,” the result of which was nonetheless an expansion of the
boundaries of art making.6 In the Soviet Union, as art historian Benjamin Buchloh
has argued, the formalism of faktura was supplanted by a turn to the factographic pho-
tograph, which supposedly “render[ed] aspects of reality visible without interference or
mediation.”7 In the United States, a “documentary style” emerged in the work of pho-
tographer Walter Evans, who proposed that one could adopt the look and format of the
document for aesthetic purposes—even while a majority of the work produced in this
style in the 1930s was tied to the social welfare politics of the state.8
While the document purportedly offered a directness of experience, documenta-
tion, by contrast, was about mediated understanding.9 Modernist bureaucratic ma-
chines of the early twentieth century churned out an abundance of paper, magnetic,
and filmic records, creating in turn a demand for new strategies of collecting and ar-
chival storage. Documentation science (after 1968, called “information science” in
Europe and North America) brought order to social history and the administration
of everyday life. Documents and archives had the potential to make life function
more smoothly; both were repositories of modern truths, consulted for improving
 Introduction 203

our understanding of criminal forensics, qualitative and quantitative studies of popu-

lations, public health, and collective or personal psychologies.
Given the power of these bureaucratic tools and the political regimes that wielded
them, it is unsurprising that artists in the 1960s used strategies of documentation in
ways that persistently challenged “the nineteenth century’s confidence in the registra-
tion of time” (Sven Spieker), drawing new kinds of connections between media or re-
introducing subjective dimensions to information.10 After World War II, modernist
aesthetic values were rapidly being reshaped alongside a revolution in recording and
communications technologies. In this context, American critic Harold Rosenberg
(1906–78) offered an important counterpoint to the prevailing ideology of autonomous
art when he proposed that “new American painting” (Abstract Expressionism) regis-
tered the traces of an artist’s activities or labors rather than a planned composition.11
Around the same time, the writings of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(1908–61) influenced artists who were increasingly concerned with embodied percep-
tion over formal dimensions of an image.12 In opposition to the forced “objectivity” of
totalitarian and Cold War discourse (and mass media that bolstered both state power
and formalist aesthetics), a concern for the contingent and the subjective motivated
artists to explore more direct acts of expression—now through the same highly
coded media forms as the mass media. As they engaged in documentation of everyday
lived experiences in the 1960s, artists used various kinds of recording media to leave
open the meaning for their audiences, encouraging more active participation in the
process. As the perpetual crises of the Cold War wore on into the late 1950s and
early 1960s, the use of documents to hold or enforce power deepened, as did the cri-
tique of their effects. Documents were increasingly understood as subject to revision
and change. As Martha Barratt describes in her essay in this issue, documentation
could be used and reused “to enable resistance to historicization,” a particularly em-
powering effect when the subject documented was the self.13
The 1960s were thus a transitional period that moved away to some extent from the
accumulation of seemingly “transparent” documents to the use of documentation as a
“literal” means of communicating diverse lived realities, often in service of exposing the
personal or subjective. A range of recording formats and production techniques newly
available to consumers also made it possible for young artists to challenge the presumed
neutrality of these forms and their function as straightforward records. With these
tools, documentation could be a creative practice, allowing artists to reshape, multiple,
or develop new works—rejecting, in the process, the stability of recorded information.
Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s (1911–80) technologically determinist
view of media resonated strongly, especially with North American artists and their
publics, helping to establish documentation as an important dimension of media
ecology.14
The allegedly neutral, “transparent” dimension of documentation was still valued
in its capacity to transmit ephemeral, site-specific, or process-based art practices, like
those that art critic Lucy Lippard (b. 1937) characterized in the 1960s as “dematerial-
ized.”15 Documentation was an important concern for conceptual artists, but its role
and status were ambiguous. In some cases, documentation was seen as secondary to
the piece and could, according to artists Lawrence Weiner (b. 1942) and Robert
204 Berger and Santone

Barry (b. 1936), “be distracting” or “ge[t] in the way of the art.”16 In other instances it
formed an essential component of the piece, so that the distinction between documen-
tation and the work itself was difficult to draw.17 While the medium of such documen-
tation was often photography, among its privileged sites of appearance was the printed
page of an artist’s book or exhibition catalog. With documentation, artists had the po-
tential to record, elaborate, or even generate works or ideas, but the portability and
cheapness of its materials helped artists communicate those ideas to larger international
audiences and expressed a political desire for the “de-commodification of art.”18
Likewise for the emerging set of practices called new music, happenings, actions,
and events, documentation was important to the transmission of details about a live
performance. Beginning in the late 1950s, happenings and Fluxus-related events
used live bodies, audience participation, vaudevillian theatrics, or public disruptions
as art. This way of working explicitly upended systems of value in the visual arts and
frequently resonated as well with the politics of countercultural protest and participa-
tion. Many artists working in performance initially limited the influence of mediation
through documents, sometimes even restricting the use of recording technologies. But
the potential for documentation to somehow re-stage site-specific or performative
works for other audiences was compelling.19 Moreover, written or photographic doc-
umentation granted access to the witness or audience perspective.20 Documentation
came to be understood as a key component of the work in numerous instances, some-
thing that the artists increasingly incorporated directly into performances, for example
when Vito Acconci (b. 1940) turned his camera on the audience in Twelve Pictures
(1969).21 By many artists and critics, documentation was perceived during the 1960s
as failing—lacking the capacity to reproduce the live event—even when it was instru-
mental to the performance’s unfolding.22
Although the study of certain documents and documentary strategies of the 1960s
is by now well established,23 a more thoroughgoing account is needed of why and how
artists in this period engaged in the work of documentation. What is at stake in this
special issue is a richer understanding of the specific materials of documentation and
the personal or social uses of documentation in the period (as opposed to the ways
that documentation is used now to access the past). While the authors here do of
course provide close analyses of specific documents, our present study focuses rather
on how documents were produced, consumed, or otherwise used. Moreover, we are
concerned with the way that artists in the 1960s made activities that were once periph-
eral, like arranging a set of texts, central to their practices.
The essays that follow address strategies of documentation in experimental pho-
tography, conceptualist practices, and performance art (areas which frequently inter-
sected in artists’ experimentation). While these case studies are limited in their
geographical scope to the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, their examples re-
peatedly suggest that documentation was produced and circulated in ways that looked
outwardly. Berger’s article describes this effect in terms of American conceptual artist
Douglas Huebler’s (1924–97) introduction of “worldly matters,”24 while Samantha
Ismail-Epps’s contribution looks at how British and American conceptualists used doc-
umentation “to extend the reach of their ideas”25 and Santone’s essay discusses how
documentation sustained social bonds amongst Fluxus artists. Moreover, each of
 Introduction 205

these studies contributes to a broader narrative of documentation used strategically to

critique the institutional power of media, or, as Gyewon Kim writes in her text on Jap-
anese avant-garde photography, to “disrupt the highly encoded media spectacles dis-
tributed by mass communication.”26 The extent to which documentation is a social
practice and the degree to which it has the potential to subvert or reorder power—
whether that power is expressed through aesthetics, urban space, institutional access,
bureaucratic control, or the force of history—are key concerns for the articles in this
special issue.
In the first of these articles, “Douglas Huebler and the Photographic Document,”
Christian Berger tackles the function of document and documentation in Douglas
Huebler’s art of the late 1960s. By analyzing Huebler’s practice through the lens of doc-
umentation, Berger shows how conceptual artists resisted the aestheticization of pho-
tography through scrutiny of its materiality as document. He highlights how Huebler’s
work in particular made use of a phenomenological approach to making and organiz-
ing photographs that subordinated visual effects even as it depended on established
photographic techniques.
Gyewon Kim’s text, “Paper, Photographic Document, and the Reflection on the
Urban Landscape in 1960s Japan,” also looks at the materiality of documentation, in
the work of the Japanese avant-garde photography group Provoke. In her analysis,
the mediation and remediation of paper offered the Provoke artists the means to desta-
bilize contemporary media discourse and to redefine the experience of the city as
weightless and changeable. By using paper as a metaphor for the city in their land-
scapes, Kim argues, Provoke critiqued the state imposition of homogenous urban plan-
ning and design.
Samantha Ismail-Epps likewise explores the specific qualities and function of paper
as medium of documentation in “Artists’ Pages: A Site for the Repetition and Extension
of Conceptual Art.” Here, she argues that the reproduction of documents as “pages” in
exhibition catalogs facilitated greater access for the audience to the information artists
presented—whether obscure in its referents or absorbing in its details, the document as
page encouraged active participation. Through close readings of selected pages, Ismail-
Epps points to the intimacy of the encounter created between artist and audience by
this documentation format.
In her essay, “Documentation as Group Activity: Performing the Fluxus Network,”
Jessica Santone is concerned as well with the social relations inherent in documenta-
tion. She argues that the production and distribution of documentation within
Fluxus was a way not only to reach outside audiences, but also of maintaining and es-
tablishing relations within the loose and dispersed international group of artists. Fur-
thermore, as her analysis of projects by Japanese artist Yoko Ono (b. 1933) and the
radical art collective Hi Red Center (founded 1963 in Tokyo) demonstrates, documen-
tation could serve the formation of a group identity, as well as provide a means of ar-
ticulating a politics of identity and difference in relation to the body, race, and gender.
Likewise, in “Autobiography, Time, and Documentation in the Performances and
Auto-Archives of Carolee Schneemann,” Martha Barratt addresses the politics of doc-
umentation. Her paper considers self-documentation and auto-archiving in the work
of American artist Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939), with particular attention to the
206 Berger and Santone

ways that Schneemann reconfigured documentation of both personal and professional

life, creating complex temporalities for her audiences and producing palimpsests of
ephemera that would confound the function of documents as evidence. In this way,
Barratt argues, the artist performs a feminist critique of archiving and insists on the cre-
ative use of documentation for constructing identity.
Documentation was, by the end of the 1960s, increasingly about facilitating com-
munication or producing something new, destabilized by now through so many artists’
interventions to subvert or further activate factographic records. As media historian
Lisa Gitelman demonstrates in Paper Knowledge, acts of documenting, documents
themselves, and uses of documents were occasionally confused or conflated in this
period: “to Xerox” was to affirm the item copied as a document, to electronically
read that document in the process, and to produce a copy (document) for personal
use.27 Document leaks and manipulations of recording devices constituted major inter-
national events in the 1970s (for instance, in the explosiveness of the Pentagon Papers
and the Watergate Scandal in the United States). Documentation as art practice deep-
ened and grew more complicated in the 1970s and after; it served as key support for
institutional critique and site specific art while being ever more burdened by the
false transparency of documents.28 Meanwhile, emerging post-structuralist theory,
such as Michel Foucault’s (1926–84) Archaeology of Knowledge, had begun to shift un-
derstanding of the place of history in the construction of knowledge so that it would be
the thick, fragmented quality of the monument rather than the false transparency of the
document that would be most revealing in the postmodern era.29
The close examination of documentation as art practice in our special issue pro-
vides what we hope is a coherent approach to the study of diverse forms of 1960s
art. The essays here, moreover, give evidence of the complexity and power of documen-
tation in the 1960s that would continue to shape the work of contemporary artists later
in the twentieth century and in our present time. Our special issue thus closes with two
reviews of recent texts that demonstrate the continued relevance of these concerns. Erin
Silver discusses The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document (2014) and
author Sophie Berrebi’s analysis of the actual or supposed evidentiary status of the
document in recent art practices. And Jelena Stojković reviews the edited volume Doc-
umentary Across Disciplines (2016), which positions “the documentary” as strategy
rather than genre, and explores how it is now deployed widely across film and other
media.
Finally, in the Notes from the Field section, Melissa Gill addresses the importance of
artist archives for scholarship devoted to conceptualist, performance, and installation
art—including the presence of archival documents in recent exhibitions. She discusses
the complexity of authorship and the materiality of these archives from the point of
view of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, an institution devoted to collecting
and making available contemporary artist archives.
Taken together, the essays in this issue allow an exemplary look at the importance
of documentation, as both form and activity, in art practices of the 1960s. By consid-
ering the materialities and political motivations of such practices, these texts demon-
strate the desire for artists to take ownership of new modes of reproduction and
dissemination and assert the fraught relationship between art and document in this
 Introduction 207

period. Documentation was a meaningful way for artists of the 1960s to question tra-
ditional notions of the work of art and established uses of media such as photography,
text, or drawing. It was precisely this subversion of the evidentiary status of media that
allowed for new forms of practice and fostered critical potential, effects which remain
consequential in the use of documentation as art practice today.

Acknowledgments
Several of these essays (by Berger, Ismail-Epps, and Santone) originated at the April 2015
Association of Art Historians Annual Conference in Norwich, England, where a session on
“Documenting in the Sixties: Politics, Techniques, and Archives” was chaired by Gyewon
Kim and Jessica Santone. We were so pleased to have had the additional contributions in
that forum of Marco Pasqualini de Andrade, on the work of Brazilian conceptualists, and
Matthias Johannes Pfaller, on Chilean photojournalism. We are grateful as well for the rich
feedback from our audience in Norwich as we developed the ideas presented here.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
CHRISTIAN BERGER is a research fellow and lecturer at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Mainz.

JESSICA SANTONE is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at

California State University East Bay.

1 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22. The culmination of
postmodernism might be best celebrated in the “retroperspective” of Catherine
David’s documenta X (1997).
2 Amelia Jones, “Presence in Absentia: Performance Art and the Rhetoric of Presence,”
Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 11–18.
3 Jane Blocker, Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
4 T.J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global
Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 245. A concern for the documen-
tary within a newly globalized art world is also present in much recent curatorial work,
as in Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary
Art (New York: International Center of Photography, 2008) and his multi-sited doc-
umenta 11 (2002).
5 Sophie Berrebi, The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document
(Amsterdam: Valiz, 2014), 17–23. See Erin Silver, “The Shape of Evidence: Contem-
porary Art and the Document,” Visual Resources 32 (2016): 306–09.
6 Denis Hollier, “The Use-Value of the Impossible,” trans. Liesl Ollman, October 60
(Spring 1992): 5. See also: Walter Benjamin, “Thirteen Theses Against Snobs,” in
One-Way Street and other Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Verso, 1979), 65–6.
7 Benjamin Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (Fall 1984): 103.
208 Berger and Santone

8 Olivier Lugon, Le style documentaire: d’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945

(Paris: Macula, 2001), 18–19.
9 Jean-François Chevrier and Philippe Roussin, “Présentation,” Communications 71
(2001): 5. As French scholars Chevrier and Roussin have proposed, the material docu-
ment may be distinguished from documentation (as evidence) and from documentary
(as style) by its perpetual strangeness; the document offers “the testimony or the
inquiry as experience of social, cultural and even anthropologic otherness, which dis-
tances itself from the new norms of media information.” Our translation.
10 Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2008), 6. Spieker’s chapter on archival art beginning in the 1970s focuses on the
impact of French literary critic Roland Barthes (1915–80) and his study of myth as
sign system, whereby artists are newly concerned with “the archive’s consumption
as myth” (136). See also: Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957], trans. Annette Lavers
(New York: Noonday Press, 1990).
11 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 51, no. 8 (December 1952):
22–3; 48–50. Rosenberg later expanded this concept as it applied to the 1960s: “Art com-
municated through documents is a development to the extreme of the Action-painting
idea that a painting ought to be considered as a record of the creative processes rather
than as a physical object.” Harold Rosenberg, The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to
Pop to Earthworks (New York: Horizon Press, 1972), 59. Amelia Jones has pointed to
the limits of Rosenberg’s older article, where in her view the notion of the body is
merely made to stand in for “the (male) artist as creative subject,” effectively continuing
rather than rejecting modernist ideas of genius and autonomy. See Amelia Jones, Body
Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 72–3.
12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). An
English translation of this text was first published in 1962. One could also point here to
renewed interest in American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952), whose writings
on art focused on the process of experiencing art holistically. John Dewey, Art as Ex-
perience [1934], 3rd ed. (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958).
13 Martha Barratt, “Autobiography, Time, and Documentation in the Performances and
Auto-Archives of Carolee Schneemann,” Visual Resources 32 (2016): 301.
14 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Dimensions of Man [1964] (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
15 Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972
[1973] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
16 Patricia Norvell, “Robert Barry, May 30, 1969,” in Recording Conceptual Art: Early In-
terviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smith-
son, Weiner, ed. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), 94.
17 Alexander Alberro, “At the Threshold of Art as Information,” in Recording Conceptual
Art, ed. Alberro and Norvell, 8. See also Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, “Documentation as
Art in Artists’ Books and Other Artist Publications,” in Artists’ Publications. Ein Genre
und seine Erschließung, ed. Sigrid Schade and Anne Thurmann-Jajes (Cologne: Salon,
2009) 34–44; Robert C. Morgan, Conceptual Art: An American Perspective (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 1994).
18 Lucy R. Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art, exhibition
catalog, ed. Anne Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1995), 28.
 Introduction 209

19 For a nuanced contemporary reading of “photography’s … dialogue with artistic ideas” (not
only) with respect to ephemeral actions or installations, see: Nancy Foote, “The Anti-Pho-
tographers,” Artforum 15, no. 1 (September 1976): 54. See also: Paul Schimmel and Kristine
Stiles, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, exhibition catalog (Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, [1998] 2002); Rebecca Schneider, “Performance
Remains,” Performance Research 6, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 100–08.
20 Mechtild Widrich, “The Informative Public of Performance: A Study of Viennese
Actionism, 1965–1970,” TDR 57, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 137–51; Gavin Butt, “Happen-
ings in History, or, The Epistemology of the Memoir,” Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 2
(2002): 113–26; Carrie Lambert, “Documentary Dialectics: Performance Lost and
Found,” Visual Resources 16, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 275–85.
21 Anne M. Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91
(Winter 2000): 59–80. Judith Rodenbeck’s analysis of happenings pioneer Allan
Kaprow’s (1927–2006) rejection and eventual acceptance of documentation is also in-
structive. See Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention
of Happenings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 207–40.
22 Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ 28, no. 3
(September 2006): 1–10; Barbara Clausen, “Performing Histories: Why the Point is
Not to Make a Point … ,” Afterall 23 (Spring 2010): 36–43.
23 In addition to the titles already referred to, see e.g. Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art
and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Benjamin
H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to
the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43; Photography after Con-
ceptual Art, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen (Malden, MA: Wiley-Black-
well, 2010); Liz Kotz, Words to be Looked at: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2007); Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the
1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); John Roberts, The Impossible Document:
Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain, 1966–1976 (London: Camerawork, 1997).
24 Christian Berger, “Douglas Huebler and the Photographic Document,” Visual
Resources 32 (2016): 216.
25 Samantha Ismail-Epps, “Artists’ Pages: A Site for the Repetition and Extension of
Conceptual Art,” Visual Resources 32 (2016): 247.
26 Gyewon Kim, “Paper, Photographic Document, and the Reflection on the Urban
Landscape in 1960s Japan,” Visual Resources 32 (2016): 233.
27 Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2014), 102.
28 Consider the usage of documentation systems and acts in the work of French/Bulgar-
ian artists Christo [Vladimirov Javacheff] (b. 1935) and Jeanne-Claude [Denat de
Guillebon] (1935–2009) or German conceptual artist Hans Haacke (b. 1936). Jane
McFadden provides an interesting analysis of American artist Walter De Maria’s
(1935–2013) resistance to art institutional expectations of documentation: Jane
McFadden, “Earthquakes, Photoworks, and Oz: Walter de Maria’s Conceptual Art,”
Art Journal 68, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 68–87.
29 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans.
A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972 [1969]), 138–9. On the docu-
ment and monument in performance and architecture: Mechtild Widrich, Performa-
tive Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2014), 39–40.