Aufführung and Aufzeichnung: Science as Art?

Abstract

Presence versus representation, so runs the current formula that sums up the complex of questions that cluster around the themes of “event” and “aesthetics”, such discussed in the context of the so-called “performative turn” not only in dance and theater studies, but also in the transdisciplinary field of cultural studies, social sciences and other disciplines. This formula calls for other semantic oppositions and their discourses on the figure of the relationship (and this is a paradoxical relationship) between Aufführung and Aufzeichnung, production and preservation, event and documentation. In this article I seek to overcome such rigid oppositions and their hierarchical structure moving towards a “soft” configuration of the relationship between them, reflecting on the question of the “art of event” in its double theoretical and performative sense, that is to say: in the tension that arises between event as art and preservation as scholarship and criticism.