[-empyre-] introductory email from Tom Nicholson

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>]

into from Tom Nicholson - tomjnicholson@hotmail.com

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The process of archiving ephemeral actions has been central to my work over
the past five years or so.

Recently, this work has entailed producing large scale banners, presenting
images of faces, similar in scale and design to trade union banners from the
end of the 19th century.  These banners are carried by groups of people
through the streets in dawn marches through city streets.

These works have two lives.  One is as actions on the streets.  The other is
as traces in an interior space (usually, but not always, a gallery).  I
don't regard one as primary or secondary to the other.

It is a commonplace to say that this two-fold structure is in-built into the
history of performance art.  There is a cynical reason for this: that it is
traces (ie photos, videos, residual objects) that circulate through art
institutions and publications.  But it is also contained in the iconoclastic
bent of postwar performance.  As was eloquently demonstrated in the German
exhibition catalogue of 2002, Iconoclash, it is embedded within the project
of iconoclasm to produce more images (to document the acts of iconoclasm).

What is interesting to me is the nature of the relationship between action
and trace.

I have come to understand this relationship (mainly beacuse of my training)
as a kind of drawing.

Drawing can be understood to function in two ways.  If we take an example
out of the Western cannon of drawing (and to digress into a zone that feels
somewhat remote from an online forum), we can look at Michelangelos's last
drawing of a crucifixion.

The drawing operates as a trace of a physical process (ie a series of manual
gestures).  It is indexical.

It also operates as a kind of proposition.  It proposes the description of
Christ on the cross, and also a series of theological ideas around that
narrative.

Part of what is compelling about the drawing is the traction between these
two functions: that the traces of Michelangelo's manual gestures, the loose
lines around Christ's body, create a ghosting (prefiguring his resurrection)
or a sense of Christ's body struggling (echoing Michelangelo's frailty).

I tend to think through the problem of performance art and documentation in
terms of this drawing structure.

Traces of performances record past actions.  They also function as
propositions.  They make speculative propositions about visual language, and
often, implicitly or explicitly, about the social or political order.
Traces of actions can manifest a traction between these two functions, like
a drawing (for me, an example of an artist who realises this possibility is
Joseph Beuys).

It is the nature of radical actions that they implicitly propose future
actions (like, say, the Woomera action of 2002).

I tend to think of the traces generated by actions, be they in the political
or cultural sphere (or straddling both), as ways to articulate, or even
elaborate, what the actions propose.