The relationship between a still photograph and the live, moving performance from which it is taken can be extremely specious. To what extent is there a continuum? How far are they distinct? Further complications arise when the 'still' of a performance is no such thing, but has been created for its own sake although referring to some event somewhere else. In the latter case, therefore, where is the image and where is the performance? Does the 'life' of the action extend beyond the boundaries of the silver gelatin print? Additional problems arise from notions which would claim that a still reveals the essential of the action from which it has, indeed, been 'distilled'. But what can an inactive image really say about action and movement? In fact, how much is really understood about what movement is and what its form may be?
The trouble is that in this area of performance-photography theories of what the artists are doing are either too vague, being left at a simple statement that some relationship is being investigated without conclusions being drawn as to WHAT has been shown, or, conversely, critics have produced theories so complicated in their involved preciosity that they disincline the viewer from further thought. Nonetheless, the visual results are fascinating and performance-photography as an area of artistic activity continues to grow in importance in contemporary art.
Warner's exhibition stimulated many questions of this kind. He 'staged' seventeen of the turning-points in the action of Puccini 's opera Tosca in the form of framed, silver-gelatin prints. His intention was to investigate the transit of an image through various forms of expression. In this case, the images moved from words (the text of the opera), to visuals (the actors in costume with props and gesture), through to music, and thence to his own autonomous photographic enactment. The critical point was the leap from stage to photograph. Warner opened-up the question of whether this final transition did not, in actuality, signal a cut-off in the transposing of one form by another. He did not intend his own images to be considered as scenes from the opera, but as objects existing for their own sake. In consequence, the viewer had to consider Warner's Tosca in terms specific to the art of photography and not to that of the stage. Warner was himself aware that, in the end, the opera had been so reduced to certain moments of marked intensity that he had 'staged' a quite different work from Puccini's. This fact raises some interesting issues concerning performance-photography.
'Space' in performance terms is any space, even if it lacks three-dimensional physicality as does the photographic print. But there is one peculiarity about the photograph as a space for performance which causes it to differ from that of the stage in more than just this basic dimensionality. Rather than discussing Tosca, or its musical composer, Warner had replaced them by himself. The process of reduction and minimalization of the opera had, in a curious way, bound Warner into the visual text, so that the artist and his product could not be separated. It is possible that this is one peculiarity of performance-photography.
It raises problems about the notion of 'authorship' and 'appropriation' in post-modernism. In short, 'the author' in post-modernism cannot exist since post-structuralist theory denies the existence of an independent creative ego. Yet s/he is bound into the work in practice, even more closely than in the classic notion of 'the creator of a work' (in which the author is silent and removed once the work is "finished "). ·
It is possible that in performance-photography 'the performance' cannot stand by itself 'upfront', on its own, as on the classic theatrical stage. Unlike the live theatre where the moment is present for its own sake, the photograph is
NOT an eternal still (as Barthes would have it). Rather the image pours-off at the edges into the sequential time. It includes the setting-up of the images, the authors, the craftspeople. Maybe the photographic-performance cannot, ultimately, rid itself of a relationship with the filmed image?
The chief grace of Warner 's work was his total absence of pretension and of the doubtful narcissism which haunts much work of this kind, whether the artist is the performer or not. Warner's image had an under-stated purity and simplicity, spare and minimal, and, for that reason, they were self-referential in a way which caused one to ask questions of the above type. The sound and fury of a passionate and sadistic operatic text were reduced (paradoxically by focusing on the most dramatic or savage moments) to a silent ghastliness in which the figures were doll-like, fragile, helpless and gauche. Puccini's misogyny was evident. His hatred was wreaked on the female Tosca. The banal pointlessness of sadism was clear in the bald re-enactment of the photographs. Their minimalism had removed the cover-up of seductive eroticism which 'excuses' sadistic activity. Instead, the pathetic futility and sheer nastiness of sexual violence was revealed to be an infantile and indifferent substitute for real sexual passion.
An obsessive focus on the background in which the action took place spoke the feelings of the opera. The derelict environment of the Powerhouse enacted the drama, especially since Warner had used stage, rather than photographic lighting. The setting marked the end of the industrial age at whose beginning Tosca had been written. Warner's fascination with industrial settings extends to other of his projects in which he meticulously examines the surfaces of floors and mud-tracks of industrial areas. The 'white noise' of Tosca's factory-setting was an indication of an almost visionary perfectionism in the observation and crafting of Warner's other images of people, plants and factories. The simplicity and directness of his work belies its underlying intensity.