2 - Audiences

Summary

The performance photograph is a historicizing tool: neither the commodification nor the legitimation of the fugitive act, it is a window on the past of performance, indispensable to the contemporary practice of restaging classic events. In the photographic section, detailed performance content is juxtaposed time and again with audience reactions, indeed mostly with what we would call 'uninformed' audiences. The author thinks the indeterminacy of the audience, which is in a strong sense the subject addressed, makes this form of monument ambiguous. Let us remember the text Corpus More Geometrico, and in particular its claim that EXPORT's 'bodywriting is always also sociography and cultural history'. The body as part of cultural history becomes 'writing', a document that can bring to a reading audience an image of the 'environment body', not the actual environment body, sociography rather than society with all its visible bodies and invisible valuations.