performance art and the performing arts 217
presentation of the work. But it is apparent to the interrogative regard of the
suitably observant viewer.
Is Patriotic Tales a performance-work? The answer, I think, is that it is not.
For the vehicle that articulates the content of the work is the digitally altered
image. The content of the work depends crucially upon the obedience of
the sheep in entering and leaving the circle around the flagpole at their
appointed time. But this did not in fact happen, nor did it happen, as the film
shows, under the ministrations of Alÿs himself. Thus what Alÿs himself did –
his actions as captured on video – is not the work’s artistic vehicle. Rather,
the original video of what he did is an ingredient in the work, manipulated
to generate the work’s artistic vehicle, which is a moving image. Thus the
interrogative interest that we take in what is presented as the documentation
of a work of performance art reveals that the “documentation” is in fact itself
the work’s artistic vehicle. Constant vigilance is the price of artistic appre-
ciation when we encounter an art that revels in being, as the title of the Alÿs
exhibition warns us, “a story of deception”! Alÿs’s complex work is a final
testimony to the richness and diversity of performance in the arts that we
have explored in this book.
Notes
- Or, as we have seen, of a production or interpretation of an artwork. Or, on the
ingredients model, of a production that is itself an artwork. I ignore this com-
plication here. - See the liner notes to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (Columbia WPC-8163).
- For discussion of these works, see Nyman 1999.
- For an account of the different versions of the “score” for 4 ́ 33 ̋, including the
lost original, see Solomon 2002. - See S. Davies 1997.
- China Daily , August 30, 2009, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/.../25/content_860008.
htm, accessed August 30, 2009. - See Linker 1994.
- See, for example, the papers collected in Parker and Sedgwick 1995.
- See Chapter 2 for Levinson’s conception of performable musical works as
“indicated structures.” - Indeed, they do not involve a performance in our sense for reasons given in
Chapter 9, section 1. - To say that the artistic vehicle of a conceptual work is an idea may sound mys-
terious. How can an idea serve as a work’s artistic vehicle? A couple of remarks
may be helpful here. First, if an idea serves as a work’s artistic vehicle, then it
must be through the idea that the work articulates its artistic content. But, as
with any other work, the content is not to be identified with the artistic vehicle.