Performance, photography, theatricality and citationality: theatricality as a mode of performing citation in the still photographic image

Photography’s inherent theatricality has been evident since its origins, when Hippolyte Bayard first posed in protest at the endorsement of the Daguerrotype in his work, Self- Portrait As A Drowned Man (1839). Pauli (2006, 13-15) refers to Bayard as an actor, storyteller and photographer and the idea of posing for camera has become ingrained in our cultural consciousness. Initially this was due to the technical limitations of exposure times requiring a pose to be struck and held in order to create a successful photograph, but more latterly has become an intentional tool used both in domestic and professional photography in order to produce a certain effect. The tension that arises in photography as a medium in particular is what Barthes originally described as the particular claims it makes on presence and the spectator’s perceived desire for that realism that has given theatricality such a problematic position in photography (Barthes, 2000, 5-6).

Theatricality has, historically, been disparaged particularly by Fried (1998b, 17, 164) who states its presence in artwork is somewhat soporific and encourages passivity in the spectator, stating such theatrical works project their presence onto the viewer and anticipates the role of cinema in contemporary practice. Taylor dismisses this antitheatrical approach, suggesting the constructedness of performance signals its artificiality to reveal an antitheatrical prejudice that in more complex readings recognises the constructed as coterminous with the real (Taylor 2003, 6). She states it is possible for performance to be ‘real’ in whatever terms it is understood by. This is confluent with Rancière’s notion that drama is necessary in imagery if there is to be any action (Rancière 2009, 87).

Henry also supports this positive view of theatricality by describing the gesture specifically in relation to postmodern photography as that which ‘knows itself to be appearance’ – a self-reflexive ‘mirror’ revealing the nature of contemporary representation and that theatricality has historically (and perhaps wrongly) earned itself a bad name (Henry 2006, 113). She admits that while early-twenty-first century photography ‘makes no effort’ to deny the spectator constructed fictions, what underlies this is an invitation for the viewer to ‘participate in an imaginative engagement with representation itself and with the state of affairs in general’ (ibid., 154). In turn, she illustrates that the blurring between theatricality and photography is not caused by the fictions it creates per se but the way it can visually create situations and scenarios through which spectators can identify contemporary culture and their relationship to it.

Therefore, the shift of perceiving the presence of performance and its associated theatricality in photographic works is not a matter of using performance as a form of dramatic metaphor and neither are these images intended to be fictitious pictorial narratives created for the camera. Though narrative may happen in the spectator’s individual enactment of the photograph, these acts are meant to be viewed as staged actions that call upon the practice of citationality as a way to disrupt, deconstruct and analyse performative utterances generated through performance. It is only through the intentional performance of such citations that are then captured and displayed as photographs that we can deconstruct, analyse and consider the role of such citations in contemporary culture.

In this chapter, I examine the idea of employing theatricality as an intentional tool in photographic practice – particularly in instances of performance to camera – as a way of calling upon the power of citation as a way of ‘re-presenting’ culture to the spectator. As an intentional mode of delayed performance, this kind of practice allows the spectator the différance (or simultaneous distance and deferral, from Derrida, 1988) to consider such citations within a wider structural unconsciousness. Using Auslander’s arguments on the performativity of performance documentation and borrowing his example of Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void (1960) and its subsequent appropriations by Yasumasa Morimura (2010) and Ciprian Muresan (2004), I will illustrate that beyond being used as a tool to proliferate and disseminate performance, photography that involves such performed and theatrical moments has a wider political, social and cultural function when viewed as a means of presenting and representing citation.