Photo-documentation

The problem with making work outside the gallery system – like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast – is that it is, in many instances, ephemeral and/or inaccessible. Thus most land and environmental artists of the late 1960s and ’70s used photography to document their work. Earthwork artists such as Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim and Michael Heizer installed their works in despoiled industrial sites or uninhabited corners of the world, creating pieces that were largely dependent on photography as witness to their existence. Smithson’s famous Spiral jetty 1970 is one example – a sculpture, some 500 metres or 1500 feet in length, made of mud, salt crystals and basalt rock that coiled counter-clockwise over the Great Salt Lake in Utah, USA.

Photo-documentation in ‘post-object’ art movements such as happenings, performance and land art arose before, or at the same time as, conceptual art. This explosion of out-of-gallery modes of expression was fundamentally political. It grew out of dissatisfaction with the mainstream idea of art as a commodity. Ironically, photo-documentation provided a means by which these radical forms could find their way back into museums.

The documentation of performances – mostly through photography and film – also raised questions about whether this process betrays the original ‘unmediated’ encounter between the performer and audience, turning the unique time-space of the event and its tangible, physical ‘presence’ into another commodity. Can the documentation of Christo’s Wrapped Coast – or any such one-time-only artwork – be seen as an equal to the ‘real thing’? Where today does the work exist if not in the photographic and filmic representation? Does it only exist in the historical memory of the participants and viewers at the time?