Preserving the Performance - Scholarship as Art?
Aufführung und Aufzeichnung – Kunst der Wissenschaft? (1)
Summary of the book:
After years of research Gabriele Brandstetter succeeded in bringing the field of dance studies into the public perception in order to develop a debate on dance as body-memory, art-practice and cultural institution. The present anthology gives an overview of the results of her dance research, and deals especially with questions of concepts of representation and movement in scripture, image and performance. Works of innovative choreographers and performers as Loïe Fuller, Cindy Sherman, Xavier Le Roy, Marina Abramovic, Rebecca Horn and others influenced her theories with the result of new and pioneering knowledge in this discipline. The association of dance and mediality as well as theatrality and new media enables intermedial cross-bordering and methods of narrative performance. Dance-history and dance-art are placed in the cultural and historical context of postmodernism by focussing on dance in media as photography, film, video and literature.
Table of contents:
1. Louïe Fuller: Die Tänzerin der Metamorphosen
2. Serielle Poesie. Der Tanz Loïe Fullers zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne
3. Freeing the Voice. Performance und Theatralisation
4. Still / Motion. Zur Postmoderne im Tanztheater
5. Selbst-Beschreiung. Performance im Bild
6. Geschichte(n)-Erzählen in Performances und im Theater der 90er Jahre
7. Stimm-Doubles: Performance mit dem Bildschirm - Notizen über "Karaoke"
8. Realismus und Medien im Theater der neunziger Jahre: Stefan Puchers
Snap-Shots
9. Unter-Brechung. Inter-Medialität und Disjunktion in Bewegungskonzepten Tanz und Theater der Avantgarde
10. Bild-Löschung als Erzählung. Zu einer Poetologie des Medienwechsels
11. Aufführung und Aufzeichnung - Kunst der Wissenschaft?
It is one of our typical ways of talking about theatre studies and theories of performance to speak of productions as ephemeral events. The ‘fleeting’, the ‘never-to-be-recaptured’, ‘the unique moment’ – as our topos would have it – somehow does not pertain to the concrete and lasting reality of the work of art, but it occurs only once within the space-time in which performers and audience share one single event. Productions, and also the art of the producer, – irrespective of their content and their specific form – need to be perceived. This perception occurs within a horizon of expectations and as an experience of time-present. Recent critical discourses have invoked the ideas of ‘the production of presence’ (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2)) or ‘making presence a staged event’ (Martin Seel (3)). In this way, various discussions have centered on concepts of production, event, and ‘presence’. They have raised questions as to the temporality of what is ephemeral, of what can never be recaptured: the paradoxical ‘present absence’ of the production as an event. This whole body of critical discourse is marked by an almost melancholy longing for what has been lost. Evanescence, that aspect of the production that is already lost in the moment of its realization – a complexity of structures which memory is powerless to retain in its entirety – it is this emotional factor which, in my experience, leads to an affective over-emphasis of production, whereas the recording and preserving of these events is forced to take on a secondary role.
But recording and preserving gives rise to a complementary topos of its own: the media and forms that can be applied to the task, the fixing of momentary events in writing, image and film. Related to this topos are discourses and cultural techniques of rememoration – transcription, documentation, safeguarding in archives.
‘Presence versus representation’ – so runs the current formula that sums up the complex of questions that cluster around the themes of ‘event’ and ‘aesthetics’. These questions are at present of some urgency, not only in theatre studies but also in such interdisciplinary fields as ‘cultural studies’ in its several senses. For this one formula: presence and representation – or, as Gumbrecht terms it: the opposition and interweaving of ‘cultures of presence and cultures of signification’ – calls other antitheses into existence. Thus we speak of the paradoxical antitheses of production and preservation, of event and documentation, of perception and memory in the aesthetic sphere, of movement which enacts and the stylized annotation that holds it in time.
My intention in what follows is to try and make such strong and uncompromising oppositions and their rigid, hierarchical structures modulate into a ‘weak’ configuring of the relationship between production and preservation. That means I shall be presenting the positions of artistic performance and its preservation, of production and its re-scription in a different perspective from that usual in critical discourse. I shall not be breaking up the configuration of production and preservation, but rather enforcing on it an inversion of terms. The focus of attention in what follows will thus not be the question as to whether there is an ‘art of production’. Equally, I do not wish to raise the question of preservation by embarking on an analysis of its different modes. What does interest me is the question of an ‘art of performance’ in its theoretical and performative ambivalence – that is to say: in the tension that arises between production as art and preservation as scholarship and criticism. To invoke this tension immediately opens the way to conceptual puzzles: one is whether preservation cannot itself be regarded as production, and then there is the complementary question as to whether theory itself may not open up an evidential scenario that is – in essence – performative.
It would be a major undertaking to pursue such issues in detail and to their final conclusions. For present purposes, I may thus perhaps be forgiven for cutting such a discussion down to a few key terms and hypotheses. Taking them in sequence, I shall treat the following issues:
1. Theatre Studies and their Ephemeral Object, namely ‘Production’
2. A new Vogue for ‘Understanding’?
3. Evidentia – or: Scholarship as Art?
4. Re-Ecriture – or: Preservation as Gesture (in the sense of Roland Barthes and Giorgio Agamben)
Underlying all these considerations of the coupling together of performance and preservation there is – I must confess – one constant assumption. It is not often spelled out as a sine qua non of such discussions and thus remains immune to scrutiny. It is the assumption that a faithful translation from one medium to another is possible at all. For we may counter this assumption by contending that, in the act of preserving, translating, in the crossing from one medium to another, there is already an implicit element of transformation. Whether we are speaking in terms of image, script or video – media whose potential modes of preservation must be viewed differently – the transition from one medium to another is always a factor in the process of recording. To demonstrate and reflect on this effect would be – in my view – an essential element in any description which sets out to comprehend the recording and the episteme of recording as ‘art’, which is to say: in the sense of techné. (4) Indeed I would go further in my intransigence and insist that it must be possible to identify a form of representation which registers the element of hiatus in the transition from one medium to another and thereby allows the gap marking the process of translation to become visible within the transcription itself. Could this be one way of binding meaningfully together the ‘art of production’ and the practice of preservation? Of demonstrating tempus (5) – in Harald Weinrich’s sense – the ‘time apart’ and ‘space apart’ of the recording in its paradoxical and dual nature? For, on the one hand, it is clear: the retrospective quality of preserving events in writing or by technical means imparts its own kind of temporality to any such recording in terms of the stratification and interruption of time-sequences. Thus it reveals itself as a reconstructive discourse, a discourse permeable to other time-sequences and one that – of necessity – contains lacunae. On the other hand, we must acknowledge the existence of what I term the pre-positional quality of recording, and this in a twofold sense: firstly, in a temporal sense, because a recording or written text always comes before the production – ‘performance and/as pre-scription’. (6) Secondly I understand recording in the sense of a ‘pro-posal’ – a placing before, hence a proposal for that re-scription (re-écriture) of what is to be preserved – a process that can never fully keep what it promises. Hence I ask you to understand ‘proposal’ in the sense of a persistent, but ultimately never quite successful approximation to the event of the production.
There is a certain diffuseness about the relationship between production and preservation – if you will allow me the metaphor: a ‘grey zone’. How can I make the diffuseness of such a ‘grey zone’ perceptible in a context such as the present one? To do this, I have chosen to interpolate eight brief visual segments which – corresponding to the etymological affinity between theoria and theatron – are to be understood in their original sense of the opening of a viewing-space. Thus, the segments will also create such openings, beginning with Gerhard Richter’s installation: Eight Grey. (7)
Segment:1st Image
‘To offer for viewing’: Pre-script in the Pro-scenium:
Entrance fee: 3 Euros. The woman collecting money asks us whether we have been fully informed: The exhibition consists of this one room only with eight pictures. There have been cases when visitors have stormed out in anger and demanded their money back.
On view: Eight Grey.
1. Theatre Studies and their Fleeting Object: ‘Production’
The question as to how the transient event of a production can be made into a transmissible object of scholarship through various systems and methods of recording has always been a central issue in theatre studies. In recent times, discussion of it has become so intense that we may well call it the main issue of the discipline. And this is not simply a question of methodology. Rather the question penetrates to the core of the discipline, since the way in which theatre studies understand and define themselves essentially depends on the processes by which, and – apparently – also the success with which this re-production of the discipline’s object may be realized. There has long been a need to subject theatre studies to an historical and methodological re-examination from this perspective. (8) Looking at those areas of research and strategies of discussion, which are of most vital interest today, there is an interesting observation to be made. I cannot dwell on it here, but simply say: hermeneutics are back in fashion. This fact emerges from the ground-breaking studies undertaken in the interdisciplinary context of the conferences organized on the field of research: ‘Kulturen des Performativen’ in Berlin around issues of performance and performativity, on the relation between presence and representation, and on temporality and the perception of time with a view to devising a theory of the event. And – significantly – what is emerging is a hermeneutic of production! Understanding and interpreting are suddenly the new shibboleths of a newly discovered – or rather: recently revived debate.
Segment: 2nd Image
‘This is no image.’
Gerhard Richter’s Eight Grey – an installation that oscillates between established genres: photograph, painting, sculpture, architecture.
‘Is this an image?’ An image of an image?
I have chosen to use transparencies; I could also have used a Powerpoint reproduction instead. – What can be glimpsed here of the possibility of a perception such as might disclose itself within the installation Eight Grey?
An intensification of the doubt that what we see corresponds to the reality of what is perceived.
2. A new Vogue for Understanding?
The debate to which I have just been referring has mainly been conducted in reference to dance – for instance, in a series of articles in the periodical ballettanz (9): ‘How to understand the art of dancing?’ (10) Or: ‘Why should we understand dance – and how? Should we read books about it?’ (11) Yet again we see at issue the opposition and tension between body and script, between performance and analysis. The claim is made for ‘dance’ that it is ‘a complex semantic system, that is: one that “structures meanings”’ (12) and such claims frequently include an appeal to have recourse to ‘hermeneutics, the art of understanding’ (13) – something that is, however, ‘far too precious to be subjected to theory-wars’. (14) So ‘dance’ as such is elevated in an obviously over-generalised, indeed essentialist manner to signifying the ephemeral par excellence. ‘Dance’ is globalised to the extent that it is used to exemplify all modes of ‘production’ and is endowed with ontological status as a ‘mighty discourse-generating mega-puzzle’. (15)
I do not wish to engage here with the conceptual and methodological questions that are endemic in this debate which is by no means novel. I also do not wish to address the opposition which is claimed to exist in these articles between ‘dance-dance’, ‘dance as pure dance’ and ‘dance as concept’. (16) Although these essays usually do not address any specific production, it is none the less clear from them that – in setting out to define how we may ‘understand’ dance – they still draw a clear line between production and observation, between enactment and interpretation.
Segment: 3rd Image
At the request of Gerhard Richter, the opaque glass of the windows in the room for the exhibit was replaced by transparent panes which afforded a view of the boulevard Unter den Linden. (17) The enameled panels of Richter’s Eight Grey echo the form of these windows. They reflect the interior, the visitors and the urban exterior which is admitted through the transparent panes.
An environment which entraps the observer: windows and opaque mirrors evoke in this interaction the blind spot in perception and understanding. I quote a remark made by Gerhard Richter in 1996 on glass as a symbol: ‘see all/understand nothing’. (18) Is it not time we simply dissolved any sharp distinction between the art of production and the scholarly discipline of describing it?
The avant-garde of the twentieth century – as we well know – said farewell to a concept of the theatre that defined it as an enclosed representation in which some ultimate meaning – be this God, the author or some other final sense – simply saw itself doubled on stage. In its place models arose – both as theory and in the most diverse forms of theatrical practice – which had the observer become a participant in the staged action. Accordingly, the barrier between observer and observed simply collapsed. Thus, a shift of paradigms from hermeneutics to deconstruction occurred, in the course of which the concepts of a pre-determined mode of understanding and the universalisation of meaning had become suspect. This shift makes itself felt once more in the debate that now flourishes on issues of ‘production and preservation’. But it is not conducted using a concept of understanding or analysis which presupposes a substantial semantic identity of the object in question – ‘dance’ as such, for example – or which concretizes production in the sense of an object under examination.
What I would like to emphasise at this point and in direct contrast to the mode of thought I have just been outlining is the important factor of the blurring of perception. (19) For this surely has a place in any discussion of production. Blurring occurs as a result of the incorporation of the observer into the space-between, the grey area that is common to production and preservation and that rules out any sharp distinction between emotionally engaged observation and a perspective which observes this same observation. Using Roland Barthes’ terminology, the process which obliterates the border between observer and performance, between a production and the means by which it is recorded, could be called a ‘sismologie’. (20) By this we may understand a radical destabilising of the position of observer, one that is indissolubly bound up with both the blurring of perspective onto any production and also with the elusiveness of the event itself. For example, the contingent quality of perception and memory in the process of perceiving and remembering within the act of observation itself could be seen as just such a destabilizing factor. It thus shatters the complacency of an understanding of the processes of preservation which is derived in purely verbal terms. Barthes replaces it with a concept of notation which is guided by the body, by the movement of the hand that records, as the manual tracing of script.
Segment: 4th Image
Grey: a coming to terms with the paradoxical mediation of two apparently incompatible epistemes of the plastic arts – the picture as a ‘transparent window onto the world’; and beside it, the ‘picture as opaque object, as a monochrome relief’. (21)
What are the implications of identifying the insertion of the observer into what is observed for a theory of the relationship between production and preservation? This question brings me to the third main point of today’s discussion, and – once again – I can only sketch in an answer.
3. Evidentia – or: Scholarship as Art?
In what way does the question as to an ‘art of production’ impinge on theory. On the scenography of notation?
Two aspects of the implied relation between an observer and the event observed seem especially relevant to me: on the one hand, the turning away from the contemplation of structures towards a foregrounding of the transience of the event. This change of position is accompanied by a new orientation towards process – not merely towards the processuality of the observed ‘occurrence’, the production, but also in an intensified awareness of temporality as it undergoes a delaying-effect and as it is – one might say – ‘corroded’ by virtue of the of recording that reconstitutes it. Only in this way can that complex of focused and thus contingent perceptions be articulated that is reassembled via the medium of a fragmented memory into a recorded likeness. Such a complex consists of several textual and temporal strata, discloses its own performativity in layered form and makes no attempt to disguise this in ways we know only too well from traditional hermeneutic or semiotic analyses of productions. Rather, it reveals itself as a mode of writing, speaking, recording which makes its own temporality visible as an interaction of closeness to and distance from the event that is the production and transposes these in a sensuous, at times sensual manner into the arena of theory. (22)
Segment: 5th Image
Eight Grey. The monochrome effect and aesthetic withdrawal:
Grey – I quote Gerhard Richter here: ‘In the grey images there is a lack of differentiation, nothingness, nullity, the beginning and the end. In the glass panes there are analogies with postures and possibilities; in coloured panels chance prevails, everything is possible, or rather: form is nonsense.’ (23)
The perception of a production and the retracing of it through the medium of memory get in each other's way at those points where the aim is to realize evidentiality. For here we have to do with different forms and modes of ‘evidence’. The area of intersection becomes visible as that region where the immediate experience of the event, the performance which appeals to a variety of sensory modes, is transposed into the field of coordinates which constitutes the act of preservation and thereby takes on a different kind of visibility: precisely that of evidentia in Quintilian’s sense of a verbal rendition of events as they occur which is so vivid that we are more inclined to believe we are seeing them than hearing them. (24) It would thus be the task of the process of recording to develop just such a correspondence to a visual confrontation: as the art of ‘writing into seeing’ (ekphrasis). This would amount to producing evidentia within a scenario of scholarship – one which would not exhaust itself by codifying a performance by its structures, settings, traditions and modes of discourse, but rather one which – within the conspectus of its ‘viewing-space’, of its demonstratio – would integrate into the very act of recording an awareness of both the conditions of its own processes of observation and of the forms and lacunae present in the conventions of perception and representation to which it adheres.
Segment: 6th Image
Eight Grey – monochrome reflecting surfaces.
An act of separating colour, surface and the textures produced by painting; what used to be seen as an image in terms of ‘painting’, shapes and texture disappears in Richter’s glass panels. Now only the observer serves as the conduit through which it enters into both the arena and process of representation. Thereby it becomes a ‘spectral kinetic manifestation’, a ‘shadow and reflex’ (25) – and vanishes once more with the observer’s departure, leaving a ‘traceless, monochrome field’ (26) behind.
How might it be possible for such a realisation of evidentia – as an act corresponding to the production itself – to be made manifest in its preservation? This question has no answer – in the sense of a method or set of rules to be applied. Rather, evidentia – to the extent that it is the result of such a process of preservation – always has an emergent status. I mean this to be understood in the sense of Niklas Luhmann’s definition that emergence is the coming into being of something which, in retrospect, always appears as a likely outcome without its ever having had the status of being the sole predictable result. (27) I put it to you that this is also a viable definition of creativity. Such a definition of emergence and the hypothesis of a co-emergence of subject and object in the sphere of scholarship would also afford us ‘a dimension of self-awareness within which scholarly observation may be organised.’ (28)
A further possibility of making manifest such evidentia as an element of emergence in the process of preservation would be to include corporeality: to implicate the body – in its dual role as agent and as the material vehicle of the processes of perceiving and recording – in the reflective process as well. The aim would therefore be to conceive of and implement an experimental approach to the art of preservation: as a mode of transcribing a production, in the sense of an ephemeral and untranslatable event, which is not fixed in the act of preservation, but which marks in a trace that emphasises the fleetingness of the very act of recording as one of its intrinsic qualities. Such a mode would also make clear that this layered process of retrospectivity in the act of recording is emphatically not meant to make up for a loss of those elements of the production that have inevitably already been taken by transience – but rather to restore something to it!
Segment: 7th Image
Eight Grey: The construction of the panels, the alignment of the monochrome glass surfaces shows: the opaque mirrors are not smooth reflecting surfaces; they are locked into place in different angles of inclination to the wall, each surface warped into itself. Thus what seems an ordering of static elements into a series becomes a mutable, genetically interacting mirror-space: Not the stasis and closedness of the glass surface – as it might appear at first sight – but instead a rotation and refraction of the reflected shape.
And does this not also amount to a critique of reflection itself? Of the exhibition and specular immersion of the observer?
4. Re-Ecriture – or: Preservation as Gesture
A mode of recording oriented to so great an extent towards the manifestation of evidentia must necessarily exhibit an awareness of its own paradoxical structure and constitution and make this part of the preserving process itself. In this way, the process is revealed as – on the one hand – the act of anchoring contingent elements of the production as a fixing which also transforms what it fixes, whilst – on the other – it is also manifest as the act of transposition itself, as a bodily, material medial act, which could also be apprehended as a performative event in its own right. It would be a process of transcription in which the act of writing would no longer be obsessed with combating by verification the fleetingness and elusiveness of a production, but would rather put its own transitory nature on open display and, in the process, put its own strategy at risk as something which is also in motion and transient. Preservation would thus be released from its compulsion to supplement what is lost, namely the loss of the never-to-be-recouped, evanescent production.
The experiment to which a theory of recording necessarily leads, as well as its status of evidentia as an artistry of scholarship, is thus grounded in the representation of the process of preservation itself: as production/as performance – and in this sense as a corporeal act manifesting itself in the temporality of movement. It would be a gesture in the terms in which Giorgio Agamben defines the term. For Agamben contends that gesture defines the status of the image in modernity by annulling its mythical immobility and transporting it into another viewing-space, so it becomes – to use a term taken from Gilles Deleuze – a series of ‘images in motion’. (29) Gesture, which belongs to the ‘sphere of action’, is – to use Agamben’s formulation – ‘the staging of a mediacy, the becoming-visible of the means as such. It makes manifest human existence as being always within a medium’. (30) In this sense, the moving trace of a written record, the act of writing, transposing, constellating – whilst always retrospective – can be effective as gesture: an action and direct-pointing which, in its action, recoups the very object of transcription.
Segment: 8th Image
Eight Grey. ‘Emptiness’, ‘the image withdrawn’, ‘manifest lack of affect’ (31) – such qualities are attributed to Gerhard Richter’s monochrome glass panels again and again. But is not the experience, the evidentia of the viewing-space at the same time beyond it? In a perceptual space of manifold corporeality, of the opening of the possible?
An art of production in the sense of academic study as an art-form does not purport to claim some rough equation of production and recording – it is important that there be no misunderstanding here. Rather, it means taking what is observed seriously. But it means taking the scholarly process with equal seriousness: as a renewed and self-renewing concentration of the act of observing – ‘observing as recapitulation’. I do not mean to introduce a didactic element at this point, nor any prescriptions for the analysis of productions. Rather this recapitulation is to be thought of as practice, as action in transposition. It makes the mediality of the process, of the ‘gesture’ as Agamben defines it, the theme of its own action and demonstration. Thus a balance is created, a ‘mutual exposition’ as Agamben phrases it, that is ‘not stasis’, ‘but a simultaneous oscillation of potentiality in the act and of the act in potentiality’. (32)
In this sense, the recording of a production – of a dance, for example – is the gesture of the gesture. Thus I give Giorgio Agamben the last word, for in his words: ‘The gesture is a potentiality that does not realise itself in the act so as to be exhausted thereby, but to preserve itself as potentiality in action - and dance within it.’ (33)
Notes
(1) The title of the German original of this essay has connotations which no single English rendition can preserve. ‘Aufzeichnung’ may have in German the sense of a pictorial or written record, such as notes or memoirs, as well as meaning the recording by technical means of a musical or staged event. ‘Aufzeichnung’ can refer to a single public performance of a work such as a ballet or an opera, or else to a whole production by a single choreographer, director or conductor, which is repeated many times. ‘Wissenschaft’ in German subsumes such categories as scholarship, in the sense of philology or academic study, but also ‘science’ in meanings normally limited in English to abstract, exact or empirical sciences. These connotations mean that the terms of the title are sometimes rendered differently in different parts of the text. Hence such terms as ‘scholarly’ may also have connotations such as ‘philosophical’ or ‘scientific’.
(2) See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘Produktion von Präsenz, durchsetzt mit Absenz. Über Musik, Libretto und Inszenierung’, in Josef Früchtl and Jörg Zimmermann (ed.), Ästhetik der Inszenierung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 2001), 63-76.
(3) See Martin Seel ‘Inszenieren als Erscheinenlassen. Thesen über die Reichweite eines Begriffs’, ibid. 48-62.
(4) At this point I am emphatically not referring to the customary practice of adding to descriptions of recorded performances the annotation that a video-tape was used as an ancilliary resource for the analysis of dance or theatrical performances.
(5) Tempus in the sense defined by Harald Weinrich, namely the ‘endowing with form’ of a ‘narrated world’ – hence a process that throws a narrative production into relief. See Harald Weinrich, Tempus: besprochene und erzählte Welt, 5th edn. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1994).
(6) Hans-Friedrich Bormann, ‘Theatralität als Vorschrift. Zu Michael Frieds Kunst und Objekthaftigkeit’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Christian Horn, Sandra Umathum and Matthias Warstat (eds.), Diskurse des Theatralen (Theatralität, 7; Basel/Tübingen: Francke 2004).
(7) The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Acht Grau (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publ. 2002).
(8) For further reading, see the important doctoral thesis by Isa Wortelkamp, Sehen mit dem Stift in der Hand. Die Aufführung im Schriftzug der Aufführung (upcoming).
(9) ballettanz 3 (2003).
(10) Franz Anton Cramer, ‘Wie darf ich Tanz verstehen?’, ibid. 28-31.
(11) Arnd Wesemann ‘Warum Tanz verstehen?’, ibid. 36-7.
(12) Cramer, ‘Wie darf ich Tanz verstehen?’, 29.
(13) Ibid. 31.
(14) Ibid.
(15) Wesemann, ‘Warum Tanz verstehen?’, 37.
(16) Cramer, ‘Wie darf ich Tanz verstehen?’, 30.
(17) See Benjamin H. D.Buchloh, ‘Gerhard Richters Acht Grau: zwischen Vorschein und Glanz’, in Guggenheim Foundation (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Acht Grau, 13-29, footnote 6.
(18) Guggenheim Foundation (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Acht Grau, 9.
(19) See Wolfgang Ullrich, Die Geschichte der Unschärfe (Berlin: Wagenbach 2002).
(20) Roland Barthes cited in Gerhard Neumann, ‘Theatralität der Zeichen’, in Gerhard Neumann, Caroline Pross und Gerald Wildgruber (eds.), Szenographien. Theatralität als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft (Rombach Wissenschaften, Litterae, 78; Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach 2000), 65-112, see in particular 68. For further reading on the phenomenon of ‘blurring’, see the article by Gerald Wildgruber ‘Theorie und Chor’, ibid. 391-452, in particular 443-4.
(21) Buchloh, ‘Gerhard Richters Acht Grau’, 14.
(22) That interpretation should also evince a quality of ‘agency’ reveals logic as no longer (solely) inherent in the paradigm of writing but also as the performative aspect of a mode of practice: as a form of action productive of evidentia. See Sibylle Peters, ‘Performative Writing 1800/2000? Evidenz und Performanz in der medialen Refiguration des Wissens’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Christian Horn, Sandra Umathum and Matthias Warstat (eds.), Performativität und Ereignis (Theatralität, 4; Basel/Tübingen: Francke 2003), 99-116.
(23) Gerhard Richter cited in Buchloh, ‘Gerhard Richters Acht Grau’, 18.
(24) See ‘Evidentia, Evidenz’, in Gerd Ueding (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 3 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1996), 33-47, in particular 44: ‘es ist dann nicht mehr, als ob die Dinge erzählt, sondern als ob sie selbst aufgeführt würden.’
(25) Guggenheim Foundation (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Acht Grau, 19.
(26) Ibid. 20.
(27) See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, John Bravman, Andrew Milne et al, Emergence. A manifesto for risk taking interdisciplinarity (2002) (unpublished, document of Gabriele Brandstetter), in particular 6.
(28) See ibid. 8.
(29) See Giorgio Agamben, ‘Noten zur Geste’, in Jutta Georg-Lauer (ed.), Postmoderne und Politik (Tübingen: Ed. diskord 1992), 97-107, in particular 101.
(30) Ibid. 103.
(31) Guggenheim Foundation (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Acht Grau, 16.
(32) Agamben, ‘Noten zur Geste’, 107.
(33) Ibid. 106.