Live Art on Camera

[ S P A C E ]
129-131 Mare Street
March 15th - 19th April
Opening evening: Friday 14 March 6-8.30pm

Live Art on Camera reveals the work of photographers who documented seminal performance art events from the 1950s to the present in Europe, the United States and Japan. These events (often experienced live by only a small audience) are primarily received through still images: arguably subjective records, translated through the ideas and aesthetics of the photographer.
The exhibition contextualises performance photography within the photographers’ wider practices. Many are well known in very different contexts (from reportage to cinematography and architectural photography) as well as being acknowledged as artists in their own right.
Works featured include Japanese photographer Ohtsuji Kiyoji’s photographs of the 1950s Gutai group, shown alongside his surrealist photography, and writings. Peter Moore’s architectural photographs of Penn Station, documenting the station’s gradual destruction from 1962 to 1966, are seen in relation to examples from his extensive archive of USA performance photographs, including Allan Kaprow’s and Wolf Vostell’s Happenings. The relationship between the ‘photographed’, the camera and the viewer was addressed in early works by Babette Mangolte, such as her film The Camera: Je, 1977 and A Photo Installation, 1978. In a parallel practice Mangolte also extensively photographed performance works by Yvonne Rainer, Robert Whitman, Joan Jonas, Richard Foreman and Trisha Brown.
In the case of Carolee Schneemann’s work many different photographers documented single performances. The exhibition reveals the diverse photographic styles of these individuals, compared and contextualised in relation to their ongoing practices
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue containing essays by Kathy O’Dell, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Barbara Clausen, Alice Maude-Roxby and Babette Mangolte, and interviews with the photographers.