Some installations 'embody' performances (e.g. video documentation of a performance), while these constituents do not affect the preservation and/or re-installation specifications. Synonyms could be 'documented installation' or 'art about art'. (q)
Terminology Workshop Inside Installations, 2006
Sherman has removed herself from the work in one sense, in that she has not concerned herself with the production of the final print. But she is famously present in het work in other ways, in the forms of masquerade announced by the film stills in the late 1970s as well as the numerous guises taken up in subsequent work. In the film stills, the nostalgic evocation of fragments from familiar film narratives (...) depends on the viewer's ability to recognize cinematic conventions. Sherman's impersonation of different characters might further suggest a reading of the film stills as performance documents. However, recognizing that these fragments are staged forces an awareness of the conventions themselves, as visual cues that suggest narrative conventions drawn from film are reinscribed in the still photograph.
Buskirk, 2003, p. 115
For [Janine] Antoni the use of highly specific materials is part of an intense and often extended encounter between her own body and a particular set of circumstances. Thus the creation of her 1992 Gnaw was based on Antoni's decision to transform the very day activity of biting into a tenaciously repeated gesture that changed the appearance of the 600-pound cubes of chocolate and lard as well as removing material that she then reprocessed to create other objects.[...] Many other works bear evident traces of actions performed elsewhere, either in the form given to objects or in actions captured by a camera.
Buskirk, 2003, p. 136 - 137
Ephemeral by nature, most performances - especially those of the 1970s - were recorded on photographs or video, and this mediatization was often incorporated into the performance itself.
Duguet, 1997, p. 22
The more immediate, the more ephemeral, the more of-the-moment or of-the-place the work is, the more likely that it is known through images and accounts, the sometimes working together, sometimes in isolation from one another. Thus there is a temporal gap built into the reception of work understood in retrospect, only through documents of inaccessible actions - unless, of course the work is identified as standing not in the initial actions but in the documents itself. There is in fact always a question of when, within a progression of choices, the document may be transformed from secondary object to something identical with the work itself, either because the emphasis has tripped toward the material realization or, at the other extreme, because the work itself is defined as a conceptual idea only partially and temporarily manifest in any specific physical environment. Thus the central role played by photography and video in the complex and fluid continuum linking performance and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s established a series of options that includes the document of the work, the document in the work, and the document as the work.
Buskirk, 2003, p. 223
The work of Vito Acconci [...] is typical of the convergence of installation, performance and Conceptual art: from making performances staged outside the gallery (and shown as documentation), he moved to performing inside the gallery space, and then abandoning performance altogether in favour of showing residual props in installations where viewers are expected to perform for themselves.
Bishop, 2005, p. 66
In 1987 […] an actual living body appeared on display in the San Diego Museum of Man. The context for this exhibit was a museum of anthropology, with a collection that both intersects and diverges from that survey-type art museum. […] Oddly enough, one exhibit that could definitely be defined as art was the human being who was temporarily on display, presented lying in a raised bed of sand and identified as 'James A. Luna, Born February 9, 1950, Luiseno Indian'. Further labels directed the viewer's attention to "burns on the fore and upper arm ... sustained during days of excessive drinking" as well as other less visible emotional scars, and nearby cases displayed such personal artifacts as music tapes, family pictures, certificates, and other mementos of his life. The installation, which involved Luna's own presence in an initial performance, and then traces through the imprint left by his body in the sand and photographic documentation, was created by an artist who, given the opportunity to work in this institution, chose to use performance and installation practices to address issues of cultural representation.
Buskirk, 2003, p. 191 - 193
Philip Auslander suggests that performance documentation has been understood to encompass two categories, which he calls documentary and theatrical. ''The documentary category represents the traditional way in which the relationship between performance art and its documentation is conceived. It is assumed that the documentation of the performance event provides both a record of it through which it can be reconstructed [...] and evidence that it actually occured [...] The theatrical category includes art works sometimes called 'performed photography' in which performances were staged solely to be photographed or filmed and had no meaningful prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences.The space of the document (whether visual or audiovisual ) becomes the only space in which the performance occurs.'' Contrary to the traditional perspective that documentary and thetrical categories are exclusive Auslander argues that ''the act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such. Documentation does not simply generate image/statement that describe an autonomous performance and state that it occured: it produces an event as a performance.'' (p)
Auslander, 2006, pp.1 - 5
