When I was first learning of performance art and beginning to understand what it was about, it was in a class that I was taking that mainly looked at diasporal performance art; more specifically, the performance of artists who were living in the US as “outsiders” culturally, ethnically, and racially. The class also focused on artists who explored the theme of representing “the other” culture, with the other referring to anything outside their own culture or the “norm.” Nikki Lee was one of the artists included in this class, although briefly, because of her assimilation into other groups and her consequent documentation. I still don’t know much about her but I have seen images of hers where she places herself within different groups of the “other” (in relation to her). From what I remember learning in the class, she actually spent more than the time it took to take the photographs with the various groups, spending maybe even weeks with each in order to “authenticate” her identifying with them in the photos, as well as to actually share in their own notion of their identity. To me, it seems as if her work was much more than what she presented within the pictures, and when I see them, I think of her work behind them and the time it took for her to changer her appearance and mannerisms. The pictures then become more than what they show, but they also don’t document the time behind their construction. Even though they are presented as if the documentation was the performance (as I remember them being presented to me), most of the performance of them lies in their preparation, which may not be documented or witnessed by an audience. Philip Auslander writes, in response to work like Nikkie Lee’s as well as her specifically, “These are cases in which performances were staged solely to be photographed or filmed and had no meaningful prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences” (86). There’s one part of this argument that I grapple with, and I still am not sure what is the case. Does an audience have to exist for a performance to exist? And therefore, does it only have to be proven through photographs or are artists’ own accounts of their performances sufficient enough? If what I know about Nikki Lee is true, then the performance she went through in order to take her photographs was as much of a performance to her as any other example of performance art. And if she were to detail her experience in a way to let the viewers of the photos know the process of their creation, is that not the same kind of proof as the photographs? I feel so, and yet, Hayley Newman abolishes that stance with her account of her “fake” performance documentation. For her, the captions and photos documented the performance as well as outlined their separate processes. By all accounts, her performances actually occurred until she said that they hadn’t. And to me, the fake accounts were performances in themselves; after all, she did do the things in the photographs, even if the events described as leading up to them were false. So in this sense, I’m not actually sure what she was trying to “prove,” if anything.

            I feel that written documentation is as much proof as photographic, and that the process of the creation of performance art that is considered “theatrical” by Auslander is more of the performance than the actual document. I feel that performance can exist without an audience, but maybe the audience is the only way it can be considered art. I want to contradict this, but then again, I don’t necessarily believe that every private action people make in a day is a performance. So to conclude, I really don’t know how I feel, but I’m pretty sure I know what I don’t feel, and here is my favorite photo of Nikki Lee’s that I could find online: