I have been trying to create a language
to return what you have lost,
and what you have abandoned,
a language to return you to yourself

Document of a Performance Never Seen

—that was how I thought of those photos, discovered in a library book, meaning that I would never see it, not from my vantage point coming from nowhere, far from the center of any cultural activity. These black and white images sometimes looked like someone with a camera happened to photograph the happening, resulting in an unsettling image, with always too much or too little information to draw many conclusions, other than some idea about the energy invested there, by the artist at the center seemingly unaware of the camera’s presence.

When I placed these images in their time, in history’s timeline as I understood it, I grasped something of that undertow that I sensed in them, that they seemed somehow aware of the turmoil out in the streets. Upheavals of social change surrounded them, as thousands of people militated for justice, and breaking waves of pressure generated not only a necessary transformation in the world, but also the painful and beautiful birth of something entirely new. Of this my small, dear, unsettling collection of images were not only aware, but they even encoded the revolutionary currencies of rebellion in their expression. They fashioned themselves beside those forces as a form of companionship. Yet they kept their own center, their distinct life force, that proposed some altogether foreign, to me at least, set of possibilities.

It strikes me now, as I revisit these protean images, that those artists worked with a degree of innocence toward an uncertain future. In one sense, they did not understand the future of the work. To which genre, if any, did it belong? What would become of it in the future? Could one repeat these actions? In a related sense, they did not see a place for themselves in the future as it pre-existed. How would these performances advance “a career”? Would anyone care? The photos stated only one idea with certainty: this happened, and it mattered enough to somebody to record it.

All of those floating questions eventually accrued strictly constrained answers, encrusted in the stifling technologies of documentation, surrounding and preconditioning today’s performance. Did I say, “today’s”? I meant yesterday’s. The grainy photos that interest us now resonate as transmissions from the day before yesterday, before the work had a name, when the practitioners ventured into unmapped territory, worked into a not-yet, driven to hyper-specifics, unrestrained by doubts – what is this that I am doing? does it have any value? – venturing an action, designing an event, not quite an image, suffused with elements of experiment and urgency. Those elements return to us now. What if we embrace them by embracing the surface of that moment? Tentative, groping, searching for self-definition; always affirmative even if uncertain, maybe affirming because of its uncertainty, with no clear future in mind, but only of its moment, and almost completely untranslatable beyond it.

In the aftermath of the library, although I would never see any more of this performance than the single photographed image, I felt obligated to imagine the rest of it. A deduced performance might then emerge, from its first moment, through every moment that preceded the photographed moment and produced it. One could always retrace a path, like a detective. But since the photo recorded something of the middle, the work of imagination then had to take a purely speculative turn, picturing what followed the photo, and how the performance proceeded to its conclusion. The photo constrained these events as well, since they would issue from the materials and structures one could observe there. The photograph then took on the prismatic life of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album cover, as crux and turning point, receiving a white beam and refracting it into a spectrum.

Let the embrace of that moment become our experiment. To remake ourselves from the outside, recreate the trace of surface: black and white, slightly confused, inconsiderate of the camera’s eye, "anthropological," touching that threshold at which order first appears out of chaos, a return to the condition of predefinition, flickering in the area between is and was. We seek to understand nothing through this work beyond the endlessly unfolding moment of its existence. We aim to rediscover as a fundamental, and to record, this elusive and eternal state of unknowing.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg and writer
Every house has a door