Off the Record

Art that escapes documentation.

Giuditta Pasta, Jenny Lind, and Maria Malibran

Giuditta Pasta (1797 –1865) was an Italian soprano so renowned that she was often been described as the Maria Callas of the 19th century. She was the kind of star for whom specific opera roles were written, including Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Bellini’s La Sonnambula, and Norma. Stendhal was one of her most fervent admirers and promotors.

Maria Felicia Malibran (1808-1836) was considered by her contemporaries as the greatest bel canto singer in the world. She was admired by Rossini and Bellini for the range and flexibility of her voice, and her “stormy personality and dramatic intensity”, as many biographies describe it, were also legendary. There are many accounts of how her singing affected audiences and made opera houses explode in acclaim. She died at age 28 in Manchester.

And Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind (1820-1887) was, also, one of the most famous sopranos of her era.  Known as “the Swedish Nightingale”, she was admired by Schumann, Berlioz and Felix Mendelssohn, with whom it is believed she might have been romantically involved. She retired from singing in 1883.

If you are an opera aficionado like me, you might wonder how, if these singers were so hugely famous, you might have never heard of them. The reason is because their careers all took place before the invention of sound recording — so it is impossible to corroborate the exalting written accounts of their singing. It is believed that Lind might have recorded, at the end of her life, a phonograph cylinder with Thomas Alva Edison, but if that were the case the recording has been lost and, at any rate, the recording technology (which was in its infancy) and the voice of the aging, retired soprano might not have given us much evidence of her artistry.

While these sopranos are largely absent in our collective memory, opera enthusiasts usually do know the names (and voices) of  Adelina Patti, Nellie Melba, Amelita Galli-Curci and Rosa Ponselle— all of which were also born in the 19th century but who had the great luck of being artistically active during and after the invention and widespread availability of the phonograph.

The reason the 19th century “unrecorded” divas often come to my mind is because of the persistent questions around documentation of live actions, performance art or experiential art, and the commonplace question that those of us confront when presenting such artworks (“was it videotaped?”)  as well as the positions that we must take concerning the documentation of the work (or documentation as the work).

Before I move to discuss the connection between these two seemingly disparate topics I want to delve a bit deeper concerning  the impact that the invention of recording had in opera and classical music in general. I asked the knowledgeable Tom Huizenga, who is producer and classical music reviewer for NPR, to give me his perspective on this.

When I asked him how one can tell the story of opera before the invention of recordings, he answered: 

“In a word: imagination. Think of all the people in Verdi’s day who never had a chance, for whatever reason but primarily financial and social status, to hear one of his operas. They could conjure it up, to some degree, in their minds. Those melodies, which were the hit pop singles of the day, made it to the streets. People hummed and sang them. There were other composers (Liszt and many others) who crafted piano and chamber music versions of arias and ensemble numbers from operas. You’d have to imagine what the singers were like by reading accounts in the papers and by word of mouth.”

To my question of how the invention of the phonograph changed music, Huizenga wrote:

“Some might conjecture that it ruined music by offering an alternative to the live experience which, after all, is always the best. But, there were rock stars (the great castrati and the rise of the virtuoso as music itself shifted to bigger, louder more florid writing in the baroque era) long before the phonograph. It certainly triggered the giant recording industry for all its good (have you never just played a song or album over and over and over again, repeating the intoxicant? I am very guilty of that still. I listened to an album 4 times in a row just this Saturday while painting, of all things, CD shelves) and bad (countless artists being cheated out of their royalties by swindlers in the music biz).   From a music lover and historian’s perspective, it certainly has provided a “document” of how trends, styles and schools of teaching has come and vanished.”

What Huizenga describes in terms of classical music, can, to an extent, apply to the visual arts, and is also famously articulated by Walter Benjamin: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” The authenticity of the art experience is so important that we tend to disdain any approximations— we want the real thing.  And it has always been interesting to me that even in the cases in the post-war era where artists rebelled against the tyranny of the object, we instinctively still want authenticity. Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 work One and Three Chairs, for instance, consists in using a chair, any chair, and reproducing it photographically alongside a definition of a chair. Yet for all practical purposes when MoMA exhibits it,  they exhibit the actual chair that was first exhibited in 1965.

Performance art emerged precisely from the desire and need to emphasize the lived moment; the question of how  to commodify it was not in the minds of any of the artists who made those works at the time when they made them. But almost as immediate, of course, came the concern of documentation: if there is no photographic or video register of the activity, how can we have any evidence that it happened?

The issue of documentation deserves an entire volume, so I want to only focus on a small portion of the topic alongside a few observations. Namely, I am interested in those artists who refuse to have their work be documented. Tino Sehgal will be most remembered, I believe, for his position against documentation of his works (his conceptual strategy to me, in a way, connects with the legacy of relational art of how the work becomes a conversation about the work). But after hearing Sehgal many times discuss this topic (and he says he likes to give a different answer every time he is asked why he doesn’t allow for documentation), I am still not entirely sure if his position is one that would necessarily be shared by other performance artists who also took this radical stance.

I turned to Martha Wilson, an artist who has lived the documentation of performance art better than anyone I know and who as many know is the founder of Franklin Furnace, the great and vital arts organization dedicated to documenting performance art. Asking her about artists who refused to document their performance work, she offered a combination of anecdotes of unrecorded performances, intentional and otherwise:

“Ralston Farina performed on November 30, 1976, the early days of Franklin Furnace.  He famously would not allow documentation of his work, so we have none in our archives.

“Julia Heyward performed Small Eyes/Frogman Stories in April of 1977 and also did not permit documentation of her work (as I recall, it was because she wanted to play to the audience instead of to the camera).  About 5 years after this she called and asked if we had any video documentation of her work—  because in the 1980s artists were applying for grants and needed visual documentation as part of their application materials.

“Mierle Laderman Ukeles did a performance about the mikvah, the monthly ritual bath taken by Jewish women to cleanse from their periods.  The text consisted of the words, "immerse again," the number of times a Jewish woman would have her period during her lifetime.  I was so mesmerized that I FORGOT to take pictures!  Luckily, another viewer had taken black-and-white snapshots and we got permission to make copies for our archives.

“Finally, Candace-Hill Montgomery invited a gospel choir to sing under the mezzanine of Franklin Furnace to launch her performance-installation and again, I was so mesmerized by their singing that I didn't take any pictures of the beginning of the show.  Later I woke up and got pictures of the installation she had built in the belly of the loft. 

After this, Franklin Furnace hired a photographer who was dedicated to documenting our performance art, exhibition and temporary installation works.”

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mikva Dreams, Franklin Furnace, New York City, performance, January 11, 1977. Photo courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

Going back to classical music, the refusal to record and the emphasis on the lived experience of the work is in many ways very straightforward and separate from the more complicated rationale that some visual artists have with documentation which in some ways make it into a conceptual extension of their work (e.g. Tino Sehgal). The famous conductor Sergei Celibidache, for instance, was against recording, but allowed for live recordings, even though he saw them (rightly so) as byproducts of his art.

Wilhemenia Fernandez in the film Diva (1981)

In the 1981 movie Diva, the main character is Cynthia Hawkins (played by Wilhemenia Fernandez), a beautiful and celebrated American soprano who would never allow her singing to be recorded— at some point confessing that she is afraid of hearing herself sing.  (Tom Huizenga believes the movie might be inspired in the early career years of  the soprano Jessye Norman).

I relate to that nervousness. While there is an aura of reverence toward “what the artist wanted” and “the artist’s original intentions” in the historicizing and interpretation of art works, the truth is that we as artists often see works very differently than how they eventually appear on video, photography or other digital record. But while the creative flight of imagination might be curtailed by showing the documentation, I, for one, am for allowing it to exist as long as we stop seeing documentation as replacement, and instead accept it as the distant, scratchy echo of an unrepeatable moment— a false playback, a mechanical representation.