CIRCA 111 article

Peter Richards

Peter Richards: collage of images from his show / performance live, live art at Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2004

My art practice and visual research during the last eight years has combined two fields of inquiry: the history of performance, and the nature of its documentation. Employing a pinhole camera as a medium and images from performances by other artists as the source material, I enabled the interpreted and the interpretation to fuse as a single entity. At first in the series Performance lucida (1996) and later in a series of ‘documents’ of live events, I explored notions of collective histories of performance art.

Kathy Rae Huffman invited me to create a new ‘collective histories of performance art’ work, Live, live art, at the Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2004. In the exhibition space we built a pinhole camera, hung a selection of my previous large-scale pinhole photographs and displayed a number of photocopies of images from books on performance art. Each image was accompanied by makeshift costumes / props for use by visitors / participants in the live event on the opening night. They were invited through the publicity material to participate either by coming already dressed as their favourite performance artist, or to use the props provided.

A number of the visitors chose to be participants. Each attempted to appear like a performance artist and held a pose for five minutes whilst the photographic paper was exposed inside the pinhole camera. The then-exposed photographic paper was processed the following morning and hung in the gallery.

Peter Richards is an artist and curator based in Belfast.

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, p.56

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