Philosophy of the Performing Arts

214 performance as art
are indisputably performable musical works. This reading would make
#7 a performable work and its playings artistic performances. It is an
interesting question whether, in such a case, we must choose between
these readings, or whether there can be works that are intended to be
appreciated both as conceptual pieces and for certain manifest properties
of their physical realizations.
Turning to the Acconci piece, there is no doubt that much of his work
falls within the performing arts. His actions in such pieces are artistic
performances in the first of our senses – they are the vehicles of performance-
works appreciable in virtue of qualities that they possess as performances.
Consider, for example, his Conversions I, II, and III (1971), described in
an exhibition catalogue as follows: “Acconci attempts to alter his sexual
boundaries and, by implication, his sexual identity by turning himself into
the image of a woman.”^13 One of these attempts involves using a candle to
burn the hair off his chest, something that was recorded without sound
on Super 8 film. This is one example of Acconci’s work as a “body artist,”
where he uses his body to explore various themes relating to our embod-
ied interactions with one another. In another such piece, he deliberately
stood “too close” to strangers in public places. We appreciate these works
by watching the filmic records of what Acconci did, which give us a mediated
access to his performance.
Following Piece , however, is significantly different. Our access to what
Acconci did is limited to a few photographs which, as noted earlier, were
staged after the completion of the performance. Here the performance-
event in question arguably enters, as vehicle, into the identity of the work
only by instantiating the type of performance characterized in the per-
formative constraints set out by Acconci. The photographic record serves
only to imaginatively enliven the performance for the receiver, to help
her to imagine what the performance was like in virtue of satisfying those
constraints. The use of photography in such a minimal documentary role is
understood by the receiver as indicating that visible features of the actual
performance not preserved on film are not important for the apprecia-
tion of the work. The photographs serve to isolate those features of the
performance-event, as vehicle, which bear upon the articulation of an
artistic content.
This speaks to our earlier observation that Following Piece has a curiously
ambiguous status. In the terms introduced a few paragraphs ago, we can say
that the piece has an essentially conceptual dimension – what matters is the
idea of doing the type of thing that Acconci did – and an essentially performative
dimension – what matters is that he actually did something of this sort. Unlike
Young’s Composition 1960 #7 , however, this doesn’t yield two distinct ways of
interpreting the piece, as either a conceptual work or a performance-work.