Voghchaberd project / started in 2003 / is a practice of accompanying with the situation of the village Voghchaberd, Kotaik region, Armenia the territory undergoes continuous processes of landslide. The website contents is the result of specific walks on the village territory.
The Performative Document / Our horizon of expectations with regard to art remains all too frequently conditioned by the supposed presence of the artwork: it continues to seem virtually self-evident that art appears in the world in the form of artworks. Yet this supposition seems increasingly to fly in the face of much contemporary practice, where in lieu and stead of iconic artworks, museum and gallery users find themselves confronted with artistic documents. It is of course all too easy, as is often done, to assimilate these documents with artworks, especially inasmuch as they often share the same medium (video, photography, drawing, painting, installation) without laying claimto the same iconic status or regime of visibility.
To the extent that the document is conceptualised at all. it is typically subordinated to the artwork and thought of as offering perceptual access to an artistic performance or intervention which took place in another space or time: the document is seen, in other words, as essentially representational This seminar will focus on another genre of document, one that was hardly imaginable - inasmuch as it lacked an object - even a few years ago. Artistic practices with deliberately impaired coefficients of artistic visibility can only be brought into the performative framework of the artworld by means of the document. It is thus the document which operates as a performative, changing the ontological status of symbolic configurations and activities, which had not been perceived as artistic propositions per se. It transforms the 'mere real thing" into art. Though this genre of document remains under-theorised. it has already become widespread and will become increasingly so as stealth practices themselves become more generalised. Does the performative document not herald a new status for art, anticipating a reconfiguration of art's conditions of appearing in the world? Will there come a day when art will no longer be exhibited by means of iconic artworks in galleries and art centres but through performative documents in documentation centres? / Stephen Wright (an art writer, theorist of art-related practice, research fellow at the Institut National d'Historie de l'Art in Paris ). "Dispositifs artistiques, dispositifs de pensée: le document performatif"- seminar Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux - Arts Paris, 2007
www.voghchaberd.am is part of Collection FRAC Poitou-Charentes
Karen Andreassian