216 performance as art
proper sense. It is not the idea of doing what is prescribed that articu-
lates the artistic content of the piece. Rather, what is articulated through
the actual performances, as artistic vehicles, is a conceptual point about
our appreciation of certain kinds of sounds as music.
5 Performance as Art: A Final Case
I have spoken of the task that faces the consumer of contemporary art in
identifying the artistic vehicle of a work when the work is made accessi-
ble through documentation. Echoing the question that introduced the final
section of Chapter 9, we may wonder at times how we are to know the
work from the documentation! I have also stressed throughout this book the
ways in which an interrogative interest in the artistic vehicle of an artwork
is required if we are to determine the artistic content of the work that is
thereby articulated. Sometimes, however, such an interrogative interest is
required to determine what the artistic vehicle of a work is. I close with a
cautionary example of this phenomenon.
Francis Alÿs’s 1997 work Patriotic Tales is described in the catalogue of
a recent retrospective exhibition as “video documentation of an action.”
The “action” in question is described as follows: “Alÿs first leads a line of
sheep around the Zócalo flagpole [in Mexico city], then follows them, as
if forecasting a hypothetical moment when the leader would become the
follower” (Godfrey et al 2010, 85). The catalogue also provides necessary
background for the viewer to appreciate the political resonance of the
work. In the 1968 student protests against the then Mexican government,
civil servants were brought to the main Zócalo square in Mexico City under
orders to protest in support of the government. Instead, they rebelled by
turning away from the government representatives and bleating like a flock
of sheep. Alÿs’s oeuvre contains many performance-works in which the artist
is documented walking and acting in a context where this has a political
resonance. His 2004 piece The Green Line , for example, involved walking
through Jerusalem with a leaking can of green paint retracing the “green
line” that originally partitioned the city between Israelis and Palestinians
when the state of Israel was established.
What is interesting about Patriotic Tales , however, is that, as one watches
the 24-minute “documentation,” it becomes apparent that it is not what it
claims to be. The initially baffling obedience of the sheep circling the flagpole
is revealed to the observant viewer to be a feat of digital manipulation. The
“clue” is that the light on the back of the sheep as they leave the circle fails to
match the patterns of light in the rest of the image. This is “disguised” by the
grainy nature of the black and white image, and is nowhere explained in the