Performance, photography, theatricality and citationality: theatricality as a mode of performing citation in the still photographic image

In this chapter, I examine the idea of employing theatricality as an intentional tool in photographic practice – particularly in instances of performance to camera – as a way of calling upon the power of citation as a way of ‘re-presenting’ culture to the spectator. As an intentional mode of delayed performance, this kind of practice allows the spectator the différance (or simultaneous distance and deferral, from Derrida, 1988) to consider such citations within a wider structural unconsciousness. Using Auslander’s arguments on the performativity of performance documentation and borrowing his example of Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void (1960) and its subsequent appropriations by Yasumasa Morimura (2010) and Ciprian Muresan (2004), I will illustrate that beyond being used as a tool to proliferate and disseminate performance, photography that involves such performed and theatrical moments has a wider political, social and cultural function when viewed as a means of presenting and representing citation.