The post-sixties genre of fine art known as Performance Art adopts such widely differing forms that it has become resistant to concise definition. Performance Art has grown, on the one hand, from Happenings and extended forms of sculpture, and such things as the overtly physical ‘performance‘ aspect of Jackson Pollock‘s action painting (an essentially private activity which nevertheless gained currency through being photographed and filmed), while on the other hand Performance Art has developed a two-way traffic with the multifarious activities of ‘fringe‘ theatre and popular entertainment.
The circumstances of a ‘classic‘ piece of Performance Art, with its many non-replicable elements comprising a unique event, make a conventional theatrical ‘photo-call‘ out of the question, so it has become common - nay obligatory - to find one or more photographers shooting away throughout a performance, often obtrusively. There must be some examples of Performance Art which were not recorded photographically, but not to do so has become as unthinkable as not having a photographer at one‘s wedding.
And like a wedding photographer, the photographer of Performance Art is usually seeking to represent the occasion in its own terms and at its best‘, more often than not having been commissioned by the artist or the venue so to do. Independent photography of Performance Art is rare, and rarer still arc photographs which intentionally take account of the performance‘s entire context of work/venue/audience. Look quickly through any international survey of Performance Art, then look through again, paying special attention to the audiences featured peripherally in the photographs, noticing the self-conscious sidelong glances, the sometimes barely withhold boredom or embarrassment, the presence of a large man in a suit sitting uncomfortably on the floor, feeling out of place and revealing inches of unattractive white calf. A photographer commissioned by the artist to work throughout a quiet and intimate performance, is more likely to discomfort the audience than the performer, becoming an equal focus of attention, and thereby unwittingly part of the performance. An unsolicited photographer may, however, discomfort the performer, as at the Bracknell Performance Festival in 1983, where a photographer encouraged local children to ride their bikes over an artist who was, at the time, lying motionless, face-down, naked and very vulnerable, during his outdoor performance.
There has arisen an apparent indivisibility of live performance and photography, married to an increasing reluctance or inability to rely un and enjoy the memory of a performance. In its intercession, photography may in the end take something away ‘steal the spirit‘ — breaking the ‘wholeness‘ of a live performance. A performance may be over in Live minutes or it may last several hours, and the intrinsic quality of a photograph of  Performance Art, secured in a split second of time, can often misrepresent the frequency of incident in the performance itself. A good photograph can perpetuate indefinitely an unremarkable or indifferent performance. The carnival is over, but never mind, because we got some good photo-documentation.
However many photographs may be retained by the artists as documentation of their work, seldom is more than one photograph of a performance eventually published in any one art magazine or monograph, and particularly in general
historical surveys of ‘live art‘ (it is worth remarking that several major studies of the ‘theatre of the absurd‘ are entirely unillustrated whereas no books about Performance Art lack pictures). It is at this point, in fact, that any consideration for our purposes of the nature of the original performance may as well be forgotten, for it is here that the photograph takes on a ‘life of its own‘. Single photographic images such as that of Wolf Vostell‘s 1963 decollage taken prior to the arranged collision of a railway engine and a car on a misty winter‘s day, or Ute Klophaus‘s photograph of Joseph Beuys during his 1965 performance, How to Explain Picturest to a Dead Hare, have become better known than any textual exegesis of the performances they represent.
Indeed, this latter photograph of Beuys epitomises the propensity for a performance to become incarnated in one photograph. Such is its evocative power that this photograph has itself prompted several more recent performances, in homage, or even in parody of the ‘Original‘ in the same way that the words of Duchamp are ‘quoted‘ in ‘art about art‘ (and Duchamp really knew what he was doing when he prohibited photography of his posthumous installation, Etant Donnés). Dead hares have also made an appearance in other ways in recent performance art and visual theatre, referring less directly to Beuy‘s performance, but still undeniably influenced by its chief photographic memento.
The audience for Beuy‘s performance was, in fact, limited to those who were invited to the opening of the artist‘s exhibition at a private gallery in Düsseldorf on the evening of 26. November 1965. With his head coated in honey and gold leaf, Beuys moved from picture to picture in the exhibition, talking intimately to the dead hare cradled in his arms, and touching the pictures with its paw. The tour complete, Beuys continued his interiorised lecture to the hare, seated on a stool-sculpture. The ‘exclusion‘ of the audience from this dialogue was an important part of the performance, though only very few published photographs of the performance show the tops of the heads of the viewers crowded into the gallery. Do those present, I wonder, recall not only Beuy‘s private conversation with the hare, but also a camera shutter mechanism whirring away? Some published photographs show only Beuys‘ head, with its patina. One of those was used as the cover photograph for the first major monograph published about the artist in Germany. But more recently the better known photograph of the seated artist has been almost the sole representation of this performance in books and magazines. In 1970 the Arts Council of Great Britain printed the photograph in the catalogue to an exhibition of ‘multiple art‘, there presented as being an ‘Edition of 4,000. Free with this catalogue‘.
Good photographs of Performance Art capture its momentary, ‘fugitive‘ aspect, and have the quality of crime reportage photography, or of photographs taken during séances. The important Hungarian artist and pedagogue, Miklos Erdely, did, in fact, publish in 1972 as a contribution to an anthology, a work in which dim photographs of mediums spewing ectoplasm were tellingly juxtaposed with photographs of  famous Happenings (or rather, famous photographs of Happenings) Joseph Beuys with a bloody nose, a Fluxus artist emptying a jug of water over himself, etc.
Such photographs offer us second-hand catharsis via their apparent evidence of Dionysian social outrage, or even the transcendence of rationality and the laws of séance. This element of attractive ‘roughness‘ has been consciously manipulated by some artists. Joseph Beuys, well able to secure crisp in-focus documentation of his performances if he wanted, authorised much blurred, bleached out, or apparently damaged photographic evidence of them, and even recycled photographs taken by others with extra ‘uncooked‘ elements added by himself, as editioned artworks. There emerged more generally during the same period a parallel incidence of editioned photographs in international printmaking biennales, and silkscreened photographic images in open photography exhibitions.
With its power to preserve and evoke transient performances, it is not surprising that photographic documentation of Performance Art began to form more than a simply documentational part of artists‘ exhibitions, and two linked genres of photographic art evolved. First, artists ‘performed‘ without an audience, in private or in deserted public spaces, the ‘piece‘ itself being the eventual exhibition or publication of the resultant photo-documentation. The best known example of this genre is perhaps that of Yves Klein leaping into the void from a high wall into the street, but other examples of the genre taken at random might include the photographs of Ralph Ortiz lacerating a hapless chair on a lonely beach, or Robert Cumming posing out of doors with giant pen-knibs covering his forearms.
The acceptance of this genre into the formal vocabulary of the contemporary exhibition/catalogue/art magazine resulted also in the presentation of single or sequential photographs of ‘apparent‘, but clearly impossible, performances, involving undisguised photographic illusion, such as Keith Arnatt‘s 1969 Self-Burial sequence, in which he appears to disappear gradually into the earth, or a three-photograph sequence by William Wegman in which a dropped glass of milk miraculously lands unbroken on the floor.
Many more recent works demonstrate the expansion and elaboration of this genre into carefully contrived tableaux‘, which appear to capture actual performances mid-flow, though any attempt to reconstruct in detail their prior and subsequent train of events reveals the essentially ‘set-up‘ photographic nature of the exercise. The bizarre and over-the-top photographs of Les Krims represent an extreme example of this pseudo-theatrical genre, though the polaroids of Lucas Samaras are similarly baroque‘.
America has given us of late many different sorts of “performance art photography without a performance”, but such works have also manifested themselves on this side of the Atlantic, though with, at its best, its own distinctly European qualities. At its best means, at the moment, Boyd Webb, whose work has proceeded in parallel with, hut independently from, a particularly British form of alternative theatre which has become known as ‘visual theatre‘. Such theatre is exemplified by the work of the company Hesitate and Demonstrate, whose productions feature complicated and subtly lit sets which reveal a sequence of static or slowly changing tableaux, redolent of dream-like nostalgia. All of which echoes the contemporaneous reassessment of Victorian genre painting, and the re-surfacing of the work of the earlv art‘ photographers who set up tableaux in the style of academic painters.
The photographs of Boyd Webb arc quite obviously carefully ‘staged‘. He has rejected the informal black and white reportage quality of photographs of actual performances in favour of mail-order catalogue colour crispness, and has thus closed the gap between the white horse in Joseph Beuy‘s Iphigenic performance of 1969, and the equally magnificent White Horse in Peter Webb‘s whisky advertising photographs of three years later‘ thereby creating an off-key Doppelgänger world of his own.
Poetic evocations of an ‘other side‘ world via photographs of ‘implied sculptural performances‘ contrived with clarity and finesse are also the province of Boyd Webb‘s Dutch contemporary, Pieter Laurens Mol, who plumbs Jungian depths with an economy of means quite contrary to the extravagance of Les Krims, via a vocabulary of ageless European imagery. The central frame of the 25 framed photographs which form Mol‘s Nocturne (1978), for example, shows the artist dancing with a little black cat which sits on a small table lit dimly by a hanging lamp. The remaining 24 frames (the hours of the day ?) make up together a large time-lapse ‘sphere‘ of revolving stars. In The Laxative Firmament (1979) the artist‘s lower torso hangs (apparently) through an aperture in the ceiling of a room in an old house. Star-shaped objects are also, somehow, falling from the ceiling. This is the world of Kepler and Kafka and Kubin, and no doubt of other Central Europeans whose names begin with K, if only I could think of them; a world described by the Romanian Poet Nichita Stanescu thus: ‘Defeated on the outside/the Middle Ages have withdrawn/to the red & white cells of my blood.‘ (The same world surfaces occasionally in the work of some Czechoslovakian artists, whose performances derived directly from the Happenings and Fluxus art of the 1960s, and who disseminated evidence of ‘actions‘ performed in private by mail in photographic form.)
The interrelations of art photography and performance art have lately been immersed for the first time in the formalin of curatorship.  In 1984, for example, an exhibition of photographs called Landscapes, Figures, Objects: The Implied Performance, was curated by Deborah Irmas of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and she attempted to show how “formalist concerns“ in photography bad “disappeared in favour of an active eye towards performance, and how this change was not a clean distinction but one that bad occurred over a ten year period of time“. Performance Art itself, however, I would aver, has bad much less direct influence on this particular corner of the photographic zeitgeist than have photographs of Performance Art and the distinction is an important one, I think, particularly if you are a performance artist. But the traffic over the borderline between live Performance Art and still Art Photography has not always been one-way, and as you leave this gallery and enter its gallery shop full of postcards it may be worth bearing in mind the intriguing inferences of artist Tom Phillips‘ Postcard Pieces of 1970, the ‘score‘ of which reads: “Buy a postcard. Assume that the postcard depicts the performance of a piece. Perform it.“

David Briers
In Photography as Performance. The Photographers Gallery, London, 1986