Can an artist escape today's necessity for documentation?

“Meet the Makers” is a series of meetings and conversations initiated and conducted by the faculty of research and teaching at the University of Utrecht since 2022. These sessions bring together creative makers – artists, choreographers, dramaturgs, etc. – and people whose professional or personal background sparks a curiosity about meeting makers and learning about/from their practices. Within the context of the “Meet the Makers” meetings, intersectional dialogue, interdisciplinary exchange, and networking within the arts and culture field are highly promoted; participants have the opportunity to witness makers present their work – including their backgrounds, current affairs, and future aspirations – but also directly ask questions and interact with the group. 

 

Under the facilitation of performance scholar Dr. Anika Marschall, the first “Meet the Makers” session for 2024 took place on the 25th of March, featuring Phyllis Akinyi, a Danish-Kenyan dancer, choreographer, performance artist, and dance researcher, as the guest maker. Over the one-and-a-half-hour session, Akinyi delved into her approach to art and the art-making process, her practice, past and upcoming works. She did not miss the chance to also underscore her thoughts and concerns about her artistic work but also the system within which this is located and recognized as such. 

 

To kickstart the conversation, Dr. Marschall played a personal voice-recorded message she sent to Akinyi after attending her seven-hour walking performance, Anadyomene, in Denmark in 2022. Her struggle in putting her visceral experience into words was audible; it further led Dr. Marschall to confess her urge to find an appropriate documentation way for it. The idea of taking out her phone to snap pictures or record videos felt wrong; she knew it needed to be archived in a different way, one that she had not quite pinpointed yet. What can this way be, though, when the forms of documentation available to us today often strip the artwork of its most unique qualities?  

 

While talking about her own struggle with documentation, Akinyi uttered: “[as an artist] you are no more than your previous wok and your next work.” Should you, for any reason, be unable or unwilling to archive one of your creations, it is as though it never existed. Ensuring a professional recording and enduring the intrusive presence of a camera lens become imperative to prevent any ‘gaps’ in your portfolio. While this necessity for documentation turns the artwork into a reproducible commodity, as Akinyi reminds us, it also diminishes its aura for the creator, the viewer, and the artwork itself. With the aura of the work of art being, in philosopher Walter Benjamin’s words, “[a] strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be,” it cannot be separated from the authenticity and singularity that define the moment and location it takes place at (23). If, as you witness Akinyi’s dance, your gaze falls on the ground she is standing, you experience the aura of the floor colored by Akinyi’s steps. But, if you watch the video-recorded version of the same performance, then your sight is not free to roam unrestricted, but only through the mediation of a lens. The experience of the performance can only retain its aura when it is experienced at the location it is meant to be, at the time it takes place, with the people who experience it alongside you, and with the work of art transpiring before your eyes unmediated. And this experience remains outside the linguistic capacity to ‘interpret’ or ‘put into words’; it lies within you as it provokes you to explore more visceral mediums of enacting and archiving it than the ones we have at our disposal. 

 

Documentation for artists, researchers, people, hardly comes with no further ‘utility’ nowadays. People hardly take pictures for looking back at them and recollecting those moments; we want the pictures we take to be seen to acquire a certain identity. Researchers hardly write as an archiving method that will preserve their memories or thoughts alive; but they do so to promote themselves and/or the institution they are part of. Alike, artists are part of a system that requires of them to document their work in order to be recognized as such. When documentation comes in to play as a commodification practice at the altar of capitalism, then it becomes a politicized act. When it shapes and defines power relations, interpersonal interactions, identity structures, social and economic status, etc., then documentation is political, as it determines the way people interact within the wider context, the polis. Yet, Dr. Marschall’s acknowledgement that her experience of Anadyomene had to be archived differently and Akinyi’s interrogations about the definition of archive and the available documentation forms keep the negotiation moving, open up the possibilities for future generations while reminding us of the structures and systems we are part of, and we keep feeding. 

 

Now let me edit this text so it is ready for posting. – by the author

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Work Cited:

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Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael E. Jennings, et al., translated by Edmund Jephcott, et al., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. 

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Hyperlinks:

 

Phyllis Akinyi's personal website: https://www.phyllisakinyi.com/

 

Link to "Meet the Makers" sessions: https://transmissioninmotion.sites.uu.nl/meetthemakers/

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