Floating Island Steady Girl: Response to Auslander’s “The Performativity of Performance Documentation.”

On September 24^th, 2005, New-York based performance artist Kimberly Brandt raced Robert Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island along the Manhattan coastline between Pier 46 at Charles Street and East River Park at E. Houston Street in New York, NY (Brandt, www.kimberlybrandt.com). The race lasted three and a half hours and she claims to have beaten the island by approximately four minutes. There was no audience, except one photographer who documented the race. The photographer traveled by cab from one location to another, capturing still frames of her individual feat.

While reading Auslander’s “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” I recalled this performance piece my sister created when I read about Vito Acconci’s performance Photo-Piece. Although Brandt’s performance was not a series of photographs taken by the artist herself, I find an interesting connection between the two artists’ work. Auslander states about Acconci’s work that,

“…there were no bystanders to serve as the audience. More importantly, the only thing bystanders would have seen was a man walking and taking pictures: they would have had no way of understanding they were witnessing a performance.” (Auslander 4).

This is the same circumstance with which Brandt carried out her performance. Any bystanders who had seen Brandt jogging through city parks and streets would have justifiably assumed she was merely getting some exercise. And anyone who witnessed a photographer taking a photograph of a woman looking out at the floating island on the East River would not necessarily assume that he was meticulously documenting a performance that was happening right at that moment. In this essence, both Acconci and Brandt’s work is only available to an audience through this documentation.

What I find most interesting about these and other documentation-based performances is the transferability of the work to an audience. Auslander repeatedly refers to the “initial” audience and the role that the audience plays in a performance piece.

“… when artists decide to document their performances, they assume responsibility to an audience other than the initial one, a gesture that ultimately obviates the need for an initial audience.” (Auslander 7).

The transferability of a documentation-based performance to an audience is highlighted in this quote. Not only does the performance exist as a time-based artwork that an initial audience may or may not witness, it also exists through the documentation of the work, allowing the artwork to be interpreted by a different audience, in a different space and time, potentially obliterating the need for an “initial” audience in the first place.