By Meiling Cheng

I. Empathic Hyperlinks

A sheet of rice paper . At first, it shows a face of immense whiteness, disturbed by tiny inconsistency in its texture: white on white. Then, such whiteness becomes interrupted--repeatedly, if intermittently--by black ink, which seeps into the paper in the impression of classical Chinese characters inscribed in calligraphy. The white paper, having transfigured from a surface into a background, now bears the writing of a commemorative text, known as " Lantingxu " ("Orchid Pavilion Preface"), originally authored by the master calligrapher, Wang Xizhi on 3 March 353 (see Baidu baike , online). The paper's unmarked spatiality gradually loses ground, as Wang's text--composed of 324 words in the xinshu (literally "walking-writing") style--is inscribed again and again, in vertical after vertical lines, onto the remaining whiteness. After having been duplicated ten times in this layering fashion, Wang's text disappears, like whispers in cacophony, into an intricate ink painting made of overlapped columns of lines, curves, tilts, and dots. After fifty times of such replication, the painting evolves into a rectangular inky mass, its individual patterns no longer discernible. After a thousand times, Qiu Zhijie, the calligrapher who has labored for seven years to reproduce Wang's xinshu on the same sheet of paper, concludes his durational exercise. He has fulfilled a performance plan, promised by its straightforward title, Chongfu shuxie yiqian ci "Lantingxu" (Duplicating A Thousand Times "Lantingxu," 1990-1997).

A black-and-white photograph . A Chinese man stares at me, the one who reads, from inside the page of a book bilingually entitled Document/Xianchang ( Live Action Site ) (Yang 2005:006). His gaze steady, expression calm, and his crew cut overgrown, the man wears a long-sleeved shirt, which is cut diagonally across by the canvas strap for a canteen. His shirt's partially shaded surface looks like an extension from the weather-torn brick wall in the background. The picture's caption identifies the image as Yang Zhichao, the artist who has the snapshot taken to document the moment before he departs for his xingwei (behavior/performance) project, Sihuan zhi nei (Within the Fourth Ring Road, 26-30 July 1999). I turn the page and find a grayish reproduction of a Beijing map, superimposed with a diagram made of thick white arrows and dotted lines, marking Yang's itinerary within the downtown area circumscribed by the Fourth Ring Road. Five circles, accompanied by handwritten notations of dates and places, record the departing, resting, and closing spots for Yang's action. On the next page appears a list of rules for Within the Fourth Ring Road :

Xingwei Rules

Process: To beg within Beijing's Fourth Ring Road

Regulations: 1. The beggar has no money whatsoever.

2. Does not accept any help from acquaintances or friends.

3. Does not contact friends or family during the begging process.

4. Does not stop the begging activity without reason.

Time: 26 July 1999, 12PM - 30 July 1999, 12PM (lasting four days)

Range: Beijing, East to East Fourth Ring, west to West Fourth Ring, south to South Fourth Ring, north to North Fourth Ring.

Records: 1. Handwritten journals, 2. Photographs.

(Note: Ai Weiwei serves as the witness for this activity. Ai is entitled to supervise the one who executes this action and to interpret the action's rules.) (Yang 2005)

An Internet announcement . First posted on 28 December 2005, the notice consists of a list of facts and regulations outlining the plan for an artwork entitled, "Wang Mian Liang Yu Shangdian" dang an ('Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop' Document Files). The disclosed facts include the authors' names [Wang Chuyu and Wang Hong], the date when "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop" began operation [20 August 2005], the location of the shop [in Tongzhou, a suburb of Beijing], the family who manages the shop [Wang Hong (husband), Tian Haijen (wife), Wang Mian (son)], and the family's financial source [incomes from the Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop]. Such basic information is followed by the artists-developed rules:

The Artwork's Execution Plan and Process:

1. The artwork will be executed beginning 1 January 2006, until this Rice Oil Shop is forced to close by external factors beyond its control.

2. During this period, everyday a financial record for business and living expenses and incomes will be kept. Every month all these financial records will be presented. Every year an overall balance sheet will be sorted out to evaluate the shop's operation. All incomes and expenses will be publicized.

3. Once the artwork is finished, the resulting product will be the compilation of all document files for the "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop."

4. The artwork will produce documents of operation for the Rice Oil Shop, literature and documents for [Wang's] family life, and financial records for the business and life in the Rice Oil Shop.

The Artwork's Methods of Display:

1. Monthly web-posting the financial records of "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop" and the operators' itemized records for living expenses.

2. Monthly web-posting a photograph of the live operation site in "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop."

3. Producing a documentary video, "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop."

4. When the artwork is finished, an exhibition will be held to display all pictures, document files, literature about the operators' lives, and the documentary video (Wang and Wang 2005 and online, translation mine)

The three pieces that I described above feature varying combinations of selected medium, experiential interface, and performance duration.

Qiu's Duplicating A Thousand Times "Lantingxu " is a hybrid between calligraphy and performance. The artist designs the performance score to be a repeated practice of inscribing the same text on the same piece of paper over an extended period. The primary interface consists of the inscriber's deliberate hand moving through a progressively indecipherable writing surface, which becomes, as it were, an increasingly darkened mirror. "A thousand times" is, according to Qiu, an "arbitrarily chosen" number (Qiu personal website). This number, however, functions as the temporal outer frame--one necessarily prolonged due to its copious requirement--for the artwork's flexible duration.

Yang's Within the Fourth Ring Road is a loose assemblage of endurance body art via psychosomatic self-studies, ethnographic fieldwork, interactive urban ritual, and sociological investigation through a performance mode theorized by Augusto Boal as "invisible theatre" (1990:24). Since the artist has chosen "begging" as his primary action and source of survival during this project, Yang binds himself incessantly to a compulsory scenario of initiating contact with another person, soliciting the person's help, bearing the humiliation of being rejected, or expressing gratitude. Interactivity is the engine that powers the artist through his immersion in an unevenly developed post-socialist metropolis. Yet, interactivity also triggers the process of dis-identification for the artist, shifting his role from someone who consciously engages in a productive act to an indolent, parasitical, or downtrodden, nobody. Befitting his liminal mask as one who withholds the right to self-determination, Yang also rescinds his personal control over the project's duration. His artwork ended after four days when the law intervened (see Yang 2005:029, for his journal entry dated 30 July 1999).

"Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop" Document Files has at least a doubled body, which points self-reflexively to the divergent professional credentials and experiential differences between its collaborators: Wang Chuyu, an established independent artist not involved in the rice oil shop's daily operation; and Wang Hong, an aspiring artist whose main livelihood depends on the shop's smooth operation. For Wang Chuyu, the project may be considered a classical example of "Conceptual or Idea Art," in the sense once defined by Gregory Battcock as an artwork that produces, rather than a commodifiable object, "some kind of documentation referring to the concept" (Battcock 1973:1). For Wang Hong, however, a clear-cut distinction between his art, work, and life is elusive; instead, the project approximates what Allan Kaprow has described as "making nonart into art": "work in unrecognizable, i.e., nonart, modes but present the work in recognizable art contexts" (1993 [1976]:174-175). In our case here, Wang Chuyu has enabled Wang Hong's nonart business--running a grocery store--to be reconceptualized as art by presenting its financial documents monthly on an established Chinese art website: Meishu tongmeng/arts.tom.com (Wang 2006). The project's double status also affects its possible duration. While the project's process-oriented emphasis renders its durational aspect less significant in an art context, the artwork's actual duration is contingent upon the sustainability of Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop in its nonart context. The shop's potential nonart longevity would ironically keep the artwork incomplete, making its culminating, post-mortem art exhibition impossible.

Enacted between 1990 till the present date, all three selected Chinese projects rely on documentation for display and dissemination. Qiu had designated a pre-set number--a thousand times--for his calligraphic action, yet he allowed an ad-hoc structure for its execution. He had performed the inscription once a day, several times a day, and would at times lapse for days without touching the brush pen; he had done the work indoors or out (Qiu 2005). Because of its extended duration and its semi-improvisational event structure, Duplicating A Thousand Times "Lantingxu, " cannot be witnessed live in its entirety by anyone other than Qiu himself. Yang's pursuit of Within the Fourth Ring Road depends on his willing suspension of his artistic identity so as to experience, as he put it, "a means of survival based on an individual's freely chosen act to lose any human dignity whatsoever" (Yang 2005:029). During this xingwei project, Yang's unwitting coperformers--those with whom he interacted--were precisely those who could not recognize his begging as art. In fact, Yang's art could succeed only when his coperformers failed to discern his disguise. His performance is in this sense an openly engaged clandestine action. This analysis applies even to Ai Weiwei, the only artist-designated "witness" to Within the Fourth Ring Road . Without having observed the work live, Ai--being a long-term artistic mentor of Yang's--served solely as an authoritative guarantor of the artist's integrity and his action's veracity. Whereas Qiu's and Yang's artworks depend on documentation to reach a virtual, posterior viewers, documentation and its attendant public display constitute the project itself for "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop" Document Files. In this light, the shop and its documented existence in art become mutually reinforcing. The shop's "real-world" operation enables the documentation to continue; the continuous documentation redistributes the shop's financial protocols as idea art or art ideas on the Web's citational engines and virtual galleries.

Using documentation to reach a wider, off-site audience is not a novel strategy in time-based art. Documentation, in various formats, has almost always existed alongside enacted artworks as a way for the artist to recollect, record and disseminate the work. More recently, however, contemporary art worlds have shown a resurgence of interest in documentation, treating it not only as a communicative vehicle for art but also as a unique body of art. The thematic tenors of this very anthology attest to this phenomenon. Perform, Repeat, Record : Three disparate acts find their equal footings in the volume's title; their syntax challenges our acculturated habit to prioritize the original (to perform ) over the subsequent (to repeat ) and the supplementary (to record ). Still, not to utterly surrender the vigor of the live (the once alive) to its documented afterlife, the coeditors Heathfield and Jones arrange these three acts in a tacit chronology. To perform comes first; to repeat --either through reenactment of the original performance score, or by recalling what's been enacted in one's imagination--comes next, perhaps simultaneously or just a moment ahead of the third task: to record the performance, thereby mobilizing the possibilities for the given piece to enter art history.

This tacit chronology does not work for the three Chinese artworks that I evoked above, however. The three pieces' original creative acts are so intertwined with their documentary records that we can hardly distinguish when the artists' performances end and their documentations begin.

In Qiu's case, his performance is literally a repetition, which simultaneously keeps a record. Duplicating A Thousand Times "Lantingxu" cites from a traditional calligraphic technique called linmo (tracing/copying/duplicating). This two-word phrase indicates a sequence of close encounters. " Lin" evokes proximity at two junctures: where the calligrapher's fingers grasp the brush pen and where the calligrapher's master model--say, Wang Xizhi's breathtaking xinshu in "Lantingxu"--is placed close by one's hand for reverential imitation. Appropriately, "imitation" happens to be an apt translation for mo . Insofar as imitation is repetition, Qiu's piece involves no original act: his creativity lies in his re-creativity. To complicate the matter further: his re-creativity involves a self-defacing mechanism. The more he re-creates, the less legible his product becomes, yielding meanwhile a by-product that eventually erases even references to what's been re-created. Qiu's excessive recordkeeping services his performance by transmuting its traces.

In Within the Fourth Ring Road , documentation is both integral to and supplementary of the artist's performance. Yang kept numerous journal entries on each of his begging days, describing his encounters, observations, and philosophical meditations. From his futile fight to chase off mosquitoes to his bone-eating loneliness and depression, from his anger at receiving coarse insults to his fear of being physically hurt, Yang's journal narrates, if in a piecemeal and haphazard fashion, the rough goings and small consolations lived by his body. His words recall what we, his remote reader-spectators, did not and cannot see and hear in the flesh. His words stand, therefore, as accessible surrogates for the missing origin. Although the artist's body is absent, his words are here, within our reach. Through their associative flights, his words further extend the body of his performance, leading us into a temporary republic of diachronically conjoint reveries: a conceptual double take not easily achievable at the first sight, were we ever immersed in the live that Yang initiated.

In "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop" Document Files , the artwork is the process and sum total of its documentation. Documentation here exceeds its usual functions to recall and to communicate by positively enabling the performance. When infused with an artistic intention, the act of daily documenting some mundane records of petty cash exchange is suddenly endowed with a different purpose, one not necessarily higher, but less pragmatic and spirit-constraining. As someone who has little to do with the shop's day-to-day management, Wang Chuyu's performance consists of inventing a documentary structure to alchemize the shop's commercial records into non-commercial art. Although this documentary structure does not automatically enhance Wang Hong's pleasure as a shopkeeper, it does establish a conceptual rhythm for him to transmute drudgery into art, tedious repetition of labor into monthly verifications of a merchant's alternative vocation. Wang Hong's recordkeeping, cognitively reframed, performs his desired identity as an artist. As long as the two artists keep replicating this documentary structure, additional installments for their project will appear. In this collaborative piece , to perform equals to repeat and to record; the three acts happen in synchronicity.

II. Navigating Live Sites

My three Chinese case studies have arguably displaced the live into the once-lived . If we may consider the "live" in live art a collective sensory ecology surrounding the present-tense interchange between an artist's doing and some viewers' witnessing, then such collectivity becomes drastically dissipated in the once-lived , which occupies a private universe, a hermetic time-space shared by an artist and his/her consciously framed art actions. As art, however, the once-lived aspires not to become the already-dead . Documentation is the deus ex machina that intervenes to transform the once-lived into the again-alive . How does documentation accomplish this mythic feat? The once-lived is alive again because its solitude is broken. Documentation's magic lies in its explosive power; it shatters the reclusive planet inhabited by the once-lived into a radiating galaxy of asteroids. Each asteroid carries some memories of the once-lived ; each in turn extends, renews, or replaces the vitality of the once-lived ; each has the potential to grow into a different planet. Thus, the once-lived lives again and lives on, not as itself per se, but as itself altered--dismembered, redone, augmented, partially replicated, diminished, burned into ashes, or consumed as legends.

To me, what's the most generative in my improvised live art mythology above is documentation's function as a transmitter, a boundary-blasting messenger who enables some past information to travel to other ears. Yet, to identify documentation as a Hermes-like agent is to distinguish its ontology from that of performance: Just as a messenger is not synonymous with its message, so documentation (as a representational system for certain once-lived condition), is not identical to what it represents: a given performance (as a once-alive nexus of information). This kind of ontological distinction between performance and documentation is nevertheless untenable for those time-based artworks that have collapsed the temporal sequences between their embodied actions and discursive reenactments. In Duplicating A Thousand Times "Lantingxu, " for instance, Qiu's very first embodied action--as he sat quite still to breathe all energies into a moving brush pen--was already a discursive reenactment of a writerly action performed by Wang Xizhi centuries ago. Within the Fourth Ring Road provides another prototype, in which Yang's action and documentation are interwoven as complementary parts of his performance. "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop" Document Files pushes this prototype further to the discursive extreme, practically construing Wang Hong's lived experiences as a shopkeeper to be a pretext for his art documentation.

The three Chinese time-based artworks therefore participate in a contemporary live art trend that manifests an express interest in performance documentation. This emergent trend in performance research has implicitly "upgraded" documentation from its traditional status as what enables a critic/writer/distant viewer to access retrospectively a vanished artwork to be a legitimate, if not fully independent, object of inquiry. Such an upgrade endows--discursively if not literally--a given performance's documentary traces with the aura of the originary live event. Documentation, in this context, produces not only a static archive, nor just a reenactable score, but also a virtual performance event: it's (virtually) live.

The proposition of a discursive near-equivalence between a performance artwork and its documentary traces forces us to reconsider an existing presumption, which posits a stable distinction between a live art event and its subsequent multi-sourced (visual, audiovisual, literary, painterly, schematic, multimedia, etc.) performance documents. We come to see that the relationships between an originary performance (the live as well as the once-lived ) and its documentation exist not in a dichotomy but in a spectrum of possibilities. At one end of this spectrum lies my Chinese case studies, in which the embodied art actions and their documentary traces function as coinciding, interdependent, even mutually constituting, counterparts. At the other end appear those cases--most of them from the early history of performance art--wherein the artists desire to present some ephemeral actions to an onsite audience without leaving behind any (significant) documentation. In between are the majority of cases where certain live events do happen first and their documentations next--or simultaneously, as in a video recording. It is this middle majority that seems to resist the most documentation's usurpation of performance.

The middle majority's impulse for conservation has its rational grounding. There are two direct consequences to loosening the rigid barrier between a time-based art event and its documentation: (1) It permits the (relatively) permanent to impinge upon the (supposedly) ephemeral; (2) It challenges the priority of the live. The combination of these two tendencies brings forth an obvious threat to live art, plunging it back to the force of commodification: live art documentation is now available for sale, for exhibition, and for canonization. "Live," which thrives formlessly in between some sentient beings who self-select to share a stretch of site-specific temporality together, becomes materialized, solidified, an art object--yet another--detachable from its communal raison d'tre. Is there no escape from the protean grabs of capitalism?

The invisible hand of capitalism, with its current guise as transnational globalization, may be the most omnipotent climate that contributes to the condition of production for all artworks--time-based or not--in our late postmodernist era. Yet, even the bad weather cannot stop those who seek fresh air to go outdoors! Live art practitioners may choose to take the cash-signified forces of commodification as a threat, a temptation, a numbing white noise, an opponent, an oppressor, a patron saint, a goad, or an open challenge. Thus, we can still try thinking outside the box to ask: In addition to its pragmatic and profitable implications, how does the blurring of boundaries between performance and its documentation modify our conceptual mores in live art studies?

Most immediately, such a blurring compels us to reevaluate a prized methodology in performance critique, one based on an intensive onsite engagement with a live artwork. While immensely valuable, this methodology becomes problematic when it's assumed to be the most authoritative, even the minimal, credential for a critic/historian to analyze a performance piece. It seems to me that the logic behind this assumption implies an epistemic collapse between experience and knowledge, corporeal presence and purposeful introspection. Unfortunately, seeing/hearing something live doesn't guarantee knowing it fully. As Amelia Jones cautions in her article, "'Presence' in Absentia," not only is there no "unmediated relationship" between a perceiver and "any kind of cultural product," but that it also requires distance for the perceiver to make sense of a live experience through retrospective deliberation. Jones makes a strong case for experiencing performance as documentation by pointing out the analogous exchange process between a viewer watching an artist performing and a viewer/reader examining the performance documents. "While the live situation may enable the phenomenological relations of flesh-to-flesh engagement, the documentary exchange (viewer/reader <-->document) is equally intersubjective" (Jones 1997:12). Thus, Jones argues, the specific knowledge a spectator gains from participating in a live event, though valuable, should not take precedence over the equally specific knowledge that a critic/historian develops "in relation to the documentary traces of such an event" (1997:12).

Philip Auslander extends Jones's argument from an opposite end, championing the "performativity of performance documentation" to authenticate a posterior spectator's encounter of "the document itself as a performance " (2006:9). Auslander's theoretical proposition recalls the preeminence of documentation characteristic of my three Chinese case studies. The radical implication of such a position shifts the status of a performance document from its normative role as the traces that verify and preserve a live event to be a performance of its own right. Auslander further reverses the temporal sequence of a live event and its recording to suggest that " the act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such " (2006:5). This analysis effectively repositions the performance document from being an indexical link to the originary live event to being a performative entity in dialogue with its present beholder.

Common to Jones's and Auslander's arguments is their defense of the perceptual immediacy, analytical rigor, ethical feasibility, and epistemic validity of a performance critique offered by a viewer/reader who may not have seen the live event itself, but who has studied the performance artwork through its various documentary remnants. Both arguments, in fact, support my own conceptual basis in assessing the Chinese time-based artworks. Before I plea my case again, however, let me first address a zone of contention and power struggle.

The move to highlight the "intersubjective as well as interobjective" (Jones 1997:12) exchange between a critic/reader and the performance documents has the potential effect of divesting the artist, who had created the performance live, from her/his conceptual monopoly over the given artwork. For the artwork itself, as reflected in its documentary fragments and reconstructed by the critic/writer, is the real object of inquiry, whereas the artist becomes only a source, as the one who had produced--with varying degrees of conscious control--the artwork of interest. In a critique of Jones's "'Presence' in Absentia," for instance, Catherine Elwes protests precisely what she regards as a reduction of the artist's creative agency by a critic who has chosen, without having seen the live event, to interpret the piece by analyzing its documents. Elwes takes exception especially to Jones's reservation about getting to know an artist personally to ascertain his/her perceived intentions about the work. "What we were left with," as Elwes objects, "was the primacy of the written word over the visual, the postrational over the immediate non-verbal response and the critic over the person and creative output of the artist" (2004:194).

As a performance critic myself whose primary medium is words, I accept Elwes's charge that to privilege the performance documentation over its vanished referent tends to displace the artist-performer from the center stage to the wing. Moreover, at the spot vacated by the artist/creator now sits the critic/writer, whose action alternates between thumbing through an assortment of performance documents and gazing into thin air. In this scenario revolving around a writerly reader's response, there is an intervention--an intrusion, even--of critical subjectivity into the creative domain of a live artwork, effectively "demoting" artistic subjectivity--at least the parts embodied by the artist/performer's intentionality and mnemonic agency--to be mere traces among many consulted by the critic/writer in evaluating the performance. While a critic/scholar might be fully justified and indeed compelled to do so when composing a historiographic account about a century-old performance, the situation becomes highly complicated and contentious with regards to a contemporary performance piece when the original author is still alive and open to queries.

Although I will vouch for the benefit of learning from an as yet accessible creator, I also believe that the emergence of critical subjectivity, as a composite, contingent, and provisional textual embodiment of spectatorial commitment, re-creative agency, and interpretive critique, is fostered by performance art's conceptual basis. As I've elaborated elsewhere, performance art thrives on a radical incompleteness: it anticipates a spectatorial other's active perceptual, cognitive, and hermeneutic investments to complete itself (Cheng 2002). My thesis departs from the historical inception of performance art as a time-based and embodied visual art form that appropriated from theatre art the crucial element of an immediate audience. This intermedia borrowing, I suggest, helped constitute performance art's consistent structural ecology: the time-space-action-performer-audience matrix of theatricality. Unlike theatre art's communal root, however, performance art's conceptual heritage allows it to elastically remodel each element within its theatrical matrix, especially what counts as "an audience." Whereas theatre cannot sustain itself without the communal presence of a live audience, performance art manages to reconceptualize the dialogic relationship between the performer and the audience as a promise rather than an essence. This redefinition enables performance art to seek the polyphonic dynamics of the (theatrical) here-and-now even in the (conceptual) thereafter. My thesis elucidates why performance art, after some initial resistance to documentation, has quickly evolved strategies for posthumous revival by incorporating a technological arsenal for self-memorialization, as if to preempt its own mortality.

From performance art's open invitation for spectatorial others to witness, experience, and share the work's present-tensed unfolding comes infinite possibilities for onsite viewers to multiply what the work signifies, or how the live action touches those present. From performance art's desire to document itself for wider and future cultural dissemination comes the prospect of multiplying its audience base to include all those subsequent others provoked by the artwork, however distanced in time and space they are from the originary action, which might have been witnessed only by the lens of a camera, the audience of a technological eye. By willingly distributing conceptual ownership among its actual and/or virtual viewers, performance art has (inadvertently) nourished the rise of performative writing as a discursive mode that enacts--by writing into being--critical subjectivity. Although an artist might feel threatened by a critic's professed adoption of a subject position in critiquing the artwork, I hold that the expression of critical subjectivity remains bound to the analyzed artwork and, as such, communicates nothing but the response to an affective force. Besides, to foreground critical subjectivity merely discloses an ineluctable but rarely exposed process within any analytical project. Critical subjectivity complements, contests, challenges, and supplements artistic subjectivity to collaboratively locate the performance artwork in its larger sociocultural contexts. The critic and the artist therefore join in their purpose to articulate and propagate the artwork's significance in discursive memories. This joint purpose, I submit, validates performance research's recent focus on documentation as both a retrospective site that enables one to access and appraise the originary live artwork and a generative site that permits a subsequent critic/writer to discern, imagine, and amplify the cultural resonances of the given piece.

I've earlier compared documentation to a deus ex machina , swooping down from its multimedia crane to salvage the hermetic body of the once-lived and then to catapult it explosively into space, tearing the once-lived apart into myriad star seeds, waiting to sprout again. The critic as an experiential, probing, empathetic, and epistemic subject provides one of those potentially sustainable eco-pods, wherein the once-lived --despite only a smithereens of it--may come alive again--albeit in an alternatively incarnated form--in the cultural ether. Can we clearly differentiate who owes whom in this exchange? The eco-pod is inert until it's triggered into animation by a wandering star seed and the fragile star seed is lonely until it finds an echo chamber to evolve.

III. Clicking on the Prostheses

In my allegory for the information transfer process that enables live art to circulate posthumously in the culture-at-large, I chanced upon the imagery of the outer space, conjuring up a boundless vista without national borders, geo-historical diversities, economic, demographic, political, and other regional differences. This is a picture that exists only in the abstraction of a heuristic model. The model has focused on elucidating performance documentation's contribution as a facilitator in disseminating time-based art, but fails to address, say, why artists in different countries may have both different and similar reasons to document their artworks. Ironically, this boundless space with much freedom for movement, play, spontaneity, and self-determination may chime in quite harmoniously with the projection of a globalized world market filled with infinite opportunities by a multinational corporate CEO. Have we all shared our ride on Hollywood's dream machine?

I realized that my hermeneutic horizon has been subliminally affected--both cultivated and contaminated--by my particularized residency within the United States, which is harried but still complacent at its current historical moment as a relatively affluent, expansionist, self-defensive, post-industrialized nation. Despite conscious vigilance, my position as a critical subject remains complicit with this basic fact of my life, making every encounter with my Chinese artistic subjects an intercultural negotiation and my performance studies of their artworks a sub-field of Sinology. Complicating this factor is my personal immigration background as someone of a Taiwanese ancestry--someone who, moreover, had spent her formative years on an island that continues to have an ambivalent and tensed political relationship with the mainland China. There is more than one way for the Chinese artists to mark me even before or just when we began to speak; my accent, here and there, speaks louder than my syntax, English or Chinese. Whereas there is hardly any neutral critical subject to begin with, my diasporic acculturation certainly heightens the stakes of my transcontinental investigations.

These reflections lead me to propose the concept of "prosthetic performance," which addresses the complex afterlife of a time-based artwork through a process largely set in motion by performance documentation. A prosthetic device is above all an entity that stands in substitution for the irretrievable origin; it extends the origin's functionality by metaphorically giving it a second life--one that may survive indefinitely in the hereafter of an expired body of action. A constant reminder of the origin that has disappeared, a prosthesis yearns for the absent body even as it recuperates the body's raison d'tre and re-engages with its existential potentials. In a minor usage emerging more recently in the body modification subculture, a prosthetic unit (say, a breast implant) may be added to an existing body to alter the body's images, thereby augmenting, calling attention to, or otherwise transforming, its functions (see Nayar 2004). Departing from the instrumentality of the prosthetics as a medical or cosmetic technology, I use prosthetic performance to account for the various ways in which a live performance extends its vitality beyond its originary sited and time-based span.

Prosthetic performances belong to the order of documentation. They signify the relatively more accessible and distributable information sources for a live action that has transpired elsewhere. An embodied vehicle for cultural memories, a prosthetic performance enables a virtual spectator to imaginarily encounter a past time-based artwork. An eyewitness account, an oral recall, a journalistic review, and a scholarly critique about a particular live event are prosthetic performances; so are a documentary photograph, a written statement, a diagram, or a performance score prepared by the artists. These documents, remnants, evidences, and responses, appearing in a sporadic chronology and encompassing a variety of genres and mediums, are prosthetic performances. Since a prosthetic performance deals explicitly with the privilege of access, it exists less for itself than to supplement and enrich the particular live performance to which it refers. The very emergence of a prosthetic performance is a response to a vanished antecedent. While not a replica, a prosthetic performance seeks to imitate its origin by emulating its intended cultural efficacy. In prosthetic performance, live art finds an evolutionary answer to its existential dilemma: that it lives as it dies and vice versa. Resurrecting the memory of an already spent life, a prosthetic performance offers a conciliatory solution to the problem of preserving an art/life form that fulfills itself by its own expenditure.

What initially motivated me to theorize prosthetic performance was my desire to differentiate the contributions from the artist/performer's creative agency and the critic/writer's re-creative labor. If what an artist makes is a perishable body of performance, then what a critic makes, having sifted through the performance's documentary substitutes to piece together, evoke, reconfigure, and extend the original body, is a prosthetic performance. Claiming a critic's analytical as well as inventive response as a prosthetic performance rather than an authentic representation , I try to articulate two of my perennial obsessions: first, the bond between an artist and a critic in producing a live art critique; and second, the ineluctable emanation of critical subjectivity into the historiographic process. Both obsessions deal with the consequence of mortality and a mortal's attempt not to bypass death but to transfigure its finality. The first brings up the issue of acquired, in lieu of biological, inheritance: through affinity, an other gifts the self with an act, if not of love, at least of concentrated energy. This observation applies to the artist/maker as the self, who gifts the world of others with an ephemeral artwork, but who then depends on these others to remember, historicize, and make public the artwork. It also applies to the critic/writer as the self, who is inspired by the live presence and/or documentary traces of an other's artwork to operate the re-creative license, producing in turn a work that resurrects, however partially, its source of stimulation and gratitude. My second obsession concedes to the entropic tendency within human memories: what we call history is at its most sincere an approximation of what has happened. Historical verity is produced rather than retrieved by the historian's scrupulous research, both in the field and on the desk. The prosthesis of this once-lived "verity" is imagination.

My theory of prosthetic performance faced a challenge when I began working on my selected Chinese time-based artworks, in which there are no clear distinctions between enactment and documentation. What these artists make as the original performances already include prosthetic performances. Qiu Zhijie's calligraphy was at first a prosthetic performance of Wang Xizhi's masterpiece; subsequently he inscribed 999 replicating palimpsests on it. Duplicating A Thousand Times "Lantingxu " was therefore nothing but a durational prosthetic performance. Yang Zhichao's begging xingwei comprised a table of regulations, a documentary photographic portrait of the artist, the interactive live events on which he depended for survival, and his diary entries. Is Yang's table of regulations not the original performance, for which his actual begging serves as its prosthetic extension? Or, are his diary entries, produced alongside his begging, not the originary performances, which manage to turn their action referents--the begging that cannot be perceived as art--into prosthetic performances? "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop" Document Files concerns the continuous accumulation of art documents through the nonart action of running a grocery shop. The original action for this piece is split into two, both revolving around the documenting act: Wang Hong produces the original documents--his shop's actual financial records--and Wang Chuyu documents Wang Hong's documentation by framing it as art and distributing the artwork on the Internet. The two artists create prosthetic performances for which their own respective lives are the origins.

My three Chinese case studies caused a cognitive crisis in my theorization of prosthetic performance. They recall analogously what I mentioned as the "cosmetic" application of prosthetics: to add something extra to an existing body part, not exactly to replace it but to modify, ornament, and enhance it. Wang Xizhi's "Lantingxu" is the existing "body part" to the prosthetic performances contributed by Qiu Zhijie. The various parts of Yang Zhichao's performances in Within the Fourth Ring Road serve as one another's compliments or prostheses. The collaborating artists in "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop" Document Files intend to produce prosthetic performances, whose original live/life source is artistically irrelevant. These artists have chosen to highlight documentation in their time-based art for reasons that, nonetheless, seem weightier and more long-standing in the Chinese tradition than my analogy of the cosmetic prosthetics can suggest.

What's a possible "weightier" reason? The use of documentation in these artists' performance works reflect a practice that emerged in the early 1990s as an intellectual/cultural response to the heightened political tension and official prohibition regarding avant-garde art, which China's communist government considered a culprit in inciting the students' pro-democratic mass rally. Circumventing "the official prohibition of experimental art instituted immediately after the June Fourth Movement," the Sichuan art critic Wang Lin, as Wu Hung notes, invented "the format of the Document Exhibition ( Wenxian zhan ) in 1991" (Wu 1999: 178). "Consisting of reproductions of recent works by experimental artists and their writings, these shows traveled to different cities and provided an important channel of communication between experimental artists" (Wu 1999:178). In the late 1990s, when the government censorship became less systematic and the technology of dissemination witnessed a qualitative shift, these "'document exhibitions'," adds Wu Hung in a follow-up study, "have been effectively replaced by the 'virtual exhibitions,' which serve similar purposes in a new period and medium" (Wu 2000:41).

Citing Wang Lin's Document Exhibition as a precedent, Wu Hung seeks to establish what he observes as the increasing attention that Chinese contemporary art practitioners paid to the issues regarding how to exhibit experimental art in the 1990s. To extend Wu's inquiry: China's censorious government agents tend to perceive documentation as scholarly, historical, and politically inert. Documentation therefore becomes the very mechanism seized by artists, critics, and curators to initiate cultural circulations of certain artworks deemed too seditious for public display. These radical artworks, presented as themselves to the public, might provoke collective reactions, which the government would not tolerate. In contrast, to display these artworks' documents, as mere prosthetic reminders of what was allegedly "real," is an educational and cultural activity, which the government would encourage, even with funding support.

This larger political context likely persuades many Chinese time-based art practitioners to regard documentation not only as a means of preserving their ephemeral artworks, but also as the sole vehicle through which their art may be transferred to the public realm. Such a general persuasion, however, still leaves certain details in my selected case studies unexplained. Qiu began Duplicating a Thousand Times 'Lantingxu' in 1990, which came before Wang Lin's Document Exhibition. Within the Fourth Ring Road happened almost a decade later, when commercialization replaced censorship to be the major threat for China's experimental art. "Wang Mian Rice Oil Shop" Document Files appeared even later; besides, the project speaks to the socially conscious and mass-enlightening ethics of Mao Zedong's aesthetic heritage, as articulated in his Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art (see Li 1993:XII-XIII). These artworks are weak targets for censorship, but strong candidates for the Ministry of Culture's medals of honor!

Aside from institutional censorship, then, what might be other regional-specific reasons for Chinese artists to feature documentation? Reading the selected artworks within China's current sociocultural moment, I suggest that documentation serves various epistemic, redressive, pragmatic, and pedagogical functions. Due the rapid modernization and the aggressive mobilization of capital, transience and opportunism have become the order of daily urban life in China, especially since 1992, when Deng Xiaoping, after his "southern tour," reaffirmed his policy to promote socialist market economy without tampering with the hegemonic communist ideology (see Liu 2003 [1998]; Gao 1998; Zhang 2001). Since both modernization and capitalist mobilization aim for building a bright and prosperous future for China, time-based art counters this officially condoned mass rally for the future by seeking to intensify the existential awareness and relish of the present moment. Documenting time-based art amounts to producing certain culturally pertinent but financially unprofitable objects. This behavior promulgates the ethical efficacy of non-monetary alternatives for living/being. Such a subtly dissident proposal goes against the grains of the mainstream economic trends and confronts the prevalent attitudes toward conspicuous consumption as a sociocultural status symbol.

Returning to the topic of prosthetic performance, I will offer one more observation regarding my critical/documentary ventures into China's time-based art. The three artworks I examined here merely sample a particularly prominent motif--documentation--in the respective oeuvres of Qiu Zhijie, Yang Zhichao, and Wang Chuyu. These three artists are heirs to China's literati tradition, which recognizes an intellectual as a poet, a historian, and a philosopher all in one--a "total writer" of sorts. My observation finds support in that all three artists write extensively about contemporary experimental art, including publishing insightful comments on their own works. Their writerly interventions, I suggest, create a certain split--or, rather, a multiplication effect--in their artistic identities, which have incorporated critical subjectivities in their make-ups. These artists are capable of critiquing and historicizing their own art; their self-documentations rival my critical interpretations of their artworks. Whose prosthetic performance would speak the last word?

Thus, I use prosthetic performance also to mark the process of negotiations, even competitions, between the artist, who has authored the source performance, and the critic, who wills to author a subsequent critique, in their dialectic struggles and/or alliances to historicize the performance piece. A critic may choose, of course, not to develop any substantial (interpersonal) contact with the artist. I am not making an ethical argument for the need to interview an artist, but rather to describe, should such a contact happen in the critic's research, the intersubjective exchanges that may retrospectively transform the live event, simply by re-accessing it. Prosthetic performance emerges out of such loaded exchanges to alter, augment, and extend the originary live artwork, which is its source, referent, and its object of inspiration and quest.

IV. Interface, Then and Now

I opened this essay with three moments of initiation; each, infused with a sensory hook (a rice paper, a photograph, a table of rules) like a hyperlink, transported me into an altered state of mnemonic immersion. These initiatory entries allow me to suffer from what Alison Lansberg calls, "prosthetic memories" (1995:175), those that one appropriates not through strictly lived experience, but from one's empathic involvement with the information culture. Although her analysis focuses primarily on the cinematic experience, Lansberg has identified a cognitive phenomenon that I often associate with my own recall of a live performance event. By reflecting on the event again, I remember a gesture, a tonal inflection, or an accusatory glance that I might or might not have seen then and there. And the reverse also holds true: by searching through a performance's documentary traces, I remember how it happened then and there, even though I had not lived through its happening. "But thinking makes it so," as Hamlet once said through Shakespeare (or the other way around).

"[Memories] are less about authenticating the past, than about generating possible courses of action in the present," continues Lansberg. By shifting memory from the past to the present tense, Lansberg reinvests the solitary act of reminiscence with the proactive ethical responsibility. Put otherwise, for one who recognizes memory's property as prosthetic, history is always in the making. Through this epiphany, prosthetic memory merges with and becomes a drive for prosthetic performance; both gravitate toward the agency of NOW.

Prosthetic performance invites us to reconsider what we've termed "live" in both enacting and recording time-based artworks. Suddenly we wonder again what's "live" in live art? Is it "barely live" and "barely art," as Alan Read once wittily put it (2004:243)? Does it indicate the contingent dynamics among various perceptual qualities, identified by Adrian Heathfield as "immediate, immersive, interactive," each addressing the artist's manipulation and contemplation of temporality, spatiality, and corporeality (2004:8)? Does "live" signify the present-tensed co-presence of three-dimensional beings, the conscious or coincidental synchronicity between a perceiver-enactor and other entities, sentient or otherwise? Does "live" describe the process of executing a durational task or the condition of presenting/displaying the task?

Re-accessing the live alongside the prosthetic troubles what we habitually presume to be the relations between live performance and documentation, such as their sequentiality and their contrasting standings as producers of primary/original and secondary/prosthetic materials. I argue that sensing and behaving "live" is an experiential dimension that happens both in creating and in recording time-based art. For an artistic subject, being "live" may be a condition first associated with the duration of making/presenting a performance, and then it emerges as a discontinuous, accumulative, repetitive, and perhaps protracted, process in documenting a performance. For a critical subject who missed attending the live event, the sequence of experiencing "live" is somewhat reversed: moving from encountering the prosthetic to producing the meta-original, (which is simultaneously original and prosthetic). The critic's research phase consists of a prolonged, contingent, and multi-sourced process of assembling and organizing the originary artwork's prosthetic remnants--coming face to face, as it were, with those evidences and artifacts prepared by the artist's archival procedures. The research will then feed into a writing period, which progresses through some equally durational, emergent, supplementary, chancy, and largely theme-directed, motions toward the making of a prosthetic performance, one that extends the aesthetic/cultural functionality of the originary performance.

In my selected Chinese case studies, however, the live sequences that I traced above become further complicated. These artworks are either compiled of numerous prosthetic performances, or cannot be witnessed in their entirety by any intentional viewers. As interested spectatorial others, we can only experience the originary performances doubled as prosthetic performances, or imagine the sources via their prosthetic doubles. Thus, if we understand the watching of a live performance loosely as a documenting process for our mnemonic repertoires, then we may approach Qiu's, Yang's, and Wangs' documentary performances as a redoubled process of documentation, a live duration in which our experiences with the originary and the prosthetic overlap and through which we may design ( live ) our own prosthetic additions to the original prosthetic bodies.

Is there a contradiction in using documentation to create time-based art? On the surface, I believe, a contradiction does exist. If we take ephemerality as the cost of a time-based artwork, then documenting the artwork itself, or rather, performing the artwork via documentation, may be seen as creating a saving account to offset the expense of forgetfulness. Just as live art spends, so documentation salvages and saves. But, underneath the surface, ephemerality, or the sense of ceaselessly losing touch with the evaporating moment-to-moments, is precisely what drives the impulse for documentation. Extravagance inspires and depends on conservation to last.

As a prosthetic double to live art, documentation reviews, repeats, records, relearns and re-imagines a partially memorialized past to generate a present-tensed re/encounter with pieces from the past and to enable future generations' reliving of these semi-processed pasts in their own present moments. What we call "live," then, points to a perceiver's present-tensed intertwinement with the fleeting sense of being alive. Documentation offers a storehouse (or, to a more enterprising documenter, a bank) of catalysts, signs, images, mirrors, discursive fragments, and other mnemonic prompters for us to simultaneously engender and live in a prosthetic present tense.

References

Meiling Cheng

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Notes

For Chinese titles, I have adopted the pinyin system, followed by the titles' English translations in parentheses. For Chinese names, I follow the local convention of listing the surname first, unless the artists or scholars prefer otherwise. Also, unless otherwise stated, all translations from Chinese into English are mine, including the artworks' titles and cited passages. Although I follow the artworks' original Chinese titles in my pinyin versions, my translated titles at times differ from those publicized by the artists or by earlier critics.

Unless otherwise stated, all translations from Chinese into English are mine, including the artworks' titles and cited passages. Although I follow the artworks' original Chinese titles in my pinyin versions, my translated titles at times differ from those publicized by the artists or by earlier critics.

Although Document/Xianchang has a bilingual title, its text is published only in Chinese. I translated this list of rules from its Chinese version. Yang Zhichao had devised these rules before he undertook the action, but he noted "four days" as the duration of his action when the list of rules was published as part of his performance documents.