Acts of Transfer: Documentation as Creative Reimagining

A Collaborative Project by Katy Beinart and Lizzie Lloyd

An Introduction

Acts of Transfer is a project about returns, re-enactments, repetitions, and retellings. This work – a collaboration between artist Katy Beinart and writer Lizzie Lloyd, which took place in 2020–2021 – documents, reactivates and reimagines a selection of artworks from the past that contain elements of social engagement or public participation.* In Acts of Transfer we returned to nine artworks. We say ‘returned’ but actually, in all but one of the artworks, we were not present in their first iteration, so it is perhaps more accurate to say that through Acts of Transfer we bore witness to a return by the artists with whom we collaborated. We worked with each artist to decide what form their return would take. We invited the artists to bring along a participant from the original iteration of their artwork. Often, we returned to the site where the artworks first took place. And often, we were guided by documents, images, recollections or instructions, plans or readings from the original work. 

Acts of Transfer: Documentation as Creative Reimagining reflects back on the Acts of Transfer project as a whole. Alongside a new reflective and contextual essay, the exposition embeds films created after our returns as well as a range of photographs, drawings and notes taken during our visits that, together, piece together the reimagining we did four years ago.  At the heart of Acts of Transfer: Documentation as Creative Reimagining is a consideration of how artworks that are durational and that include some element of public participation might be documented. It is acutely aware of what is at stake when we document live projects: what do we capture? What do we lose? And it considers the recreative process of reimagining artworks of the past – be they our own, or the works of others – by embedding images and footage of the original artworks within our own work, allowing us to move between timeframes (now and then and tomorrow) as well as multiple subjectivities (our own, the artists’, the original project participants’ and those of new audiences). These elements come together to wonder at how we might evoke the effervescent experience of participating, remembering and communicating experiences of relational and durational artwork, to hold fast to what is lost and what might be reimagined.

About Acts of Transfer 

Our title for the project as a whole borrows from a chapter in Diana Taylor’s book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) which explores different forms of archive, questioning the documentation and recording of performance. Taylor identifies a rift between the ‘archive’ as a Western approach that privileges the textual document, and the ‘repertoire’ of performance as embodying “vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory and a sense of identity” (Taylor 2003, p. 5). The artworks that we revisited range from performances, events, and films, all of which were developed or enacted through some form of social engagement or public participation. We began by thinking about what the afterlife of projects like these might be. We wondered how they are – or how they could be – archived and what an active, creative, or experimental archive might look like. We knew that revisiting a participatory or socially engaged project after the fact of its occurrence would never be a neutral process, so we have foregrounded our subjectivities in the process while, at the same time, attempting to retain some sense of the original artwork too. 

As the winter lockdown of 2021 eased, we organised a series of visits to meet with nine artists and project participants to return to the site of a participatory artwork on which they had previously worked together. These encounters reflected on the experience of thinking about an artwork from the past, to consider its ongoing effect in the present. The conversation turned on how the memory of the original artwork shifts in the retelling, how the return to a particular site prompts new memories, and how bringing back together artist and participant sheds light on the impact of this relationship. All along we were keen not to lend sole authority to verbal or written descriptions of the events and instead to think about how the feeling of these projects might be transferred in bodily, emotive, site-specific and non-verbal ways that register the emergence of (part-)remembered events.

The sites we visited were all based in the UK but ranged from the urban to the rural: a bridge over the Avon River in the West, community centres in Brighton in the South, and the site of an old coking mine near Sheffield in the North. We stood amongst the reeds of Rainham marshes in the East, traipsed through a man-made forest near the Scottish border, spent a morning on a canal boat along the Thames and a day circling Tate Modern, London.** Mostly we were together, sometimes apart. 

Key to Acts of Transfer was an interest in drawing to the surface the complicated processes and relationships inherent in practices that rely on participation. We wanted to make this complication tangible and retain the fragmented nature of conversations and shared social experiences. We wanted to register the sense of emergence that took place in our encounters by setting ourselves the task to communicate the feeling of being a part of projects like these, to be in the middle of them, rather than just presenting a neat and tidy narrative around them.  

The communication of this feeling is where the transfer of our title comes in. As the project unfolded what became clear was how much of the work that we were doing was an act of reimagining. Our artists and their project-participants shared photos, films, recordings, stories, notes, plans, instructions, personal memories, props and other materials related to the original work all of which were methods of conveying to us some part of the original experience. In ‘A stretched-out memorial’, Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy brought along photocopies of images of their work Spatial Self-Organisation Against Injustice (2019). In ‘Be someone completely different’ Matt Stokes brought along his laptop and played a song performed by one of the original participants in the refuge that was the heart of his work, Stone Frigate (LARP) (2015). In ‘From a place of grace’ Eelyn Lee and her participant Annetha Mills brought along props from Eelyn’s film Futurist Women (2018).  

Where possible, we tried to retrace their original steps. In ‘In the moment that you’re in’ we went to Brighton where Katy Beinart and John Edwards filmed 2 Metre Conversations in 2020. Where this wasn’t possible we found other oblique means of partially reenacting their artworks such as in ‘This is power-to’ where we were split by Covid across three European cities, returning to Tate Modern – the original site of Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley’s Solidarity Line and What is the Building Calling for? (2018) – by video call. In ‘Some of us were here’ we used Harun Morrison and Helen Walker’s original instructions for Body Exchange (2014/2021) to reperform the work for an exhibition of our Act of Transfer work at Phoenix Art Space (2021). And in ‘There was kind of a dissonance’ we visited Gil Mualem-Doron at the Socially Engaged Art Salon space in Brighton. 

We saw each of these actions as ‘acts of transfer’ and each ‘transfer’ was imperfect, partial and, to various degrees, a reinterpretation. We saw this as a strength because it was in coming together to relay elements of the original project’s legacy – both visible and invisible, silent and audible, agreed upon and contested – that the projects developed into the iterations that appear in the following exposition. By setting out to return either physically to the site of a previous artwork, or to the metaphorical site of an artwork through conversation and memory, we sought to join the artist and participant in reimagining, reflecting, and partially reliving the work. Interestingly, despite our seeking out physical proximity and understanding, the artworks to which we returned remained like absent spectres in our own work. 

The outcomes of the project included a series of short films, an audio work, photographs, drawings, performances, and texts. Throughout, we were deeply aware of Taylor’s claim that, “embodied memory, because it is ‘live,’ exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it” (Taylor 2003, p. 3). We knew that our transfer would be an imperfect translation of the original experience, formed of re-imaginings of the past that we would then project into the future. We would need to embrace these imperfections: the wobbly camera lens; the overexposed photographs; the background noise of audio recordings; the meandering focus of unscripted and unstructured conversation; the distracted attention of each other and our participants. All of these, we knew, would need to be relayed in Acts of Transfer and so they appear here in grainy images, in passing commentaries made up of unfinished sentences that register our multiple voices, and in the overlay of images and thoughts and words and walks and people and places that are set in relation, at once an evocation and reimagining of how things might have been.

* We use the terms social, participatory, and relational practice loosely throughout this project as we’re interested in the mutability of these terms.

** The drawn shapes that punctuate this exposition roughly outline the routes we took at each site.

Part 1: Documenting socially engaged / participatory artworks

Let us take a step back, though, to give context to our thinking. Artists who work in ways that invite public participation into their artistic activity often have a huge amount of work to do to collate the many hours of discussion, workshopping, and planning that such projects entail. After all these hours of working with others, we become plagued with questions about how these experiences can be transformed artistically, in order to share with others not present. After all these months of planning and making and talking, what do we have to show for it? What’s left after durational artworks are over? How can we share experiences with others, who are not present? What will have changed? Why does it matter? And how can we show that it matters? Another way of putting this is to say: how will the work that we are doing now – whether we are working alone, or with others – endure? What will the legacy of this work be? What will be left of it when I, or we, or you are done? The answer – especially when it comes to event-based artworks, for which the audience after-the-fact will inevitably outnumber those reached by direct or active participation – is documentation. 

But what do we mean by this? We need to first understand what we are documenting, why we are documenting, what we mean by documentation and what is at stake when we document. So what is at stake here? The contested value of Socially Engaged Art (SEA) has been a subject of continual debate since the inception and evolution of the term (variously called socially engaged art practice, participatory art, relational aesthetics, and social practice) by art critics, artists and scholars including Nicholas Bourriaud (2009), Claire Bishop (2006a, 2006b), Grant Kester (2006), and others.  Arguments have raged about what the value of SEA is or should be, and whether SEA should foreground its presentation or the process of its making. Such discussions inevitably lead to challenges about what aspects of the work to document, exhibit and retain. In 2009, Bourriaud defined relational aesthetics as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space”, laying a stake to the positioning of SEA and relational art in the space of the gallery (2009, p. 34). However, around this time arguments about the definition, intention and value of this work were also playing out, for instance, around the aesthetic versus ethical value of the work between Bishop and Kester in the pages of Artforum (Bishop 2006a, 2006b; Kester 2006). Bishop argues that, while she acknowledged the value of the politics of participation in re-humanizing or de-alienating, it had led to a situation where “collaborative practices are automatically perceived to be equally important artistic gestures of resistance” (Bishop 2006a). The danger, as she sees it, is that such work comes to be judged purely for its ethical value (Bishop 2006a). In response, Kester suggests that Bishop’s demands are based on her own need to fulfil her role in decoding the works as an art critic (Kester 2006). Bishop responds by highlighting that, “without artistic gestures that shuttle between sense and nonsense, that recalibrate our perception, that allow multiple interpretations, that factor the problem of documentation/presentation into each project, and that have a life beyond an immediate social goal, we are left with pleasantly innocuous art” (2006b). This argument was alive in our thinking during the making of Acts of Transfer but we were keen to move beyond the familiar dichotomy of aesthetic value and against ethical worth.

Developing artworks in participation or collaboration with people who don’t necessarily identify as artists or as creative professionals is one way that the art world machine attempts to deal with the ongoing problem of a lack of diversity and inclusivity in the arts. It is telling that Bishop’s critique of this kind of work still rings true, after nearly 20 years: “Collaborative practices are automatically perceived to be equally important artistic gestures of resistance: there can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond” (Bishop 2006, n.p.). Very often, exhibitions about artworks that have involved public participation are so eager to explain what happened, to whom and why it was so important that the feeling of the work gets lost. During the ongoing making, documentation and discussion of Acts of Transfer (these three modes for us go hand in hand) we tried to focus on how the project unfolded, onhow it felt, and how it feels (in the ongoing, “continuous present”, as Gertrude Stein would say) through memory and retellings and reimaginings. Given that the vast majority of art’s audiences (especially SEA audiences) will not have experienced the artwork for themselves, in the real,  the matter of how such work presents and communicates beyond the life of the making and execution of the project or the unfolding of the event is vital. Bishop calls this matter, participatory art’s necessary “dual horizon” or (after Guattari, its “dual finality”). She says participatory art functions in two distinct ways. It must be: “– faced towards the social field but also towards art itself, addressing both its immediate participants and subsequent audiences”. Without this dual horizon participatory artworks “risk becoming ‘edutainment’ or ‘pedagogical aesthetics’”(Bishop 2012, pp. 273–4). Curator Maria Lind offers an alternative approach which highlights the question of subjectivity. Lind comments that it is crucial to distinguish between the intention of the artist, the work itself, and someone’s interpretation of the artwork (Lind 2007, p. 22). This perhaps recognises the subtleties and gradations of the movement that the work makes between art and the social field, the subjectivities of those producing it, and the relation that might produce (Simpson 2001, p. 48; Jackson 2011, p. 43).

Often SEA is so focused on its desire to show why it matters socially, that the question of aesthetic experience, affect, and attachment ends up forgotten. The paradox of how to represent and document SEA is evident in Pablo Helguera’s writing on the subject. In his book, Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), he draws on Habermas to suggest that: “if we accept that SEA is a type of communicative action—the result of an intersubjective dynamic—it is incongruous that its documentation be only the one-sided account of the artist.” He goes on, “Habermas would argue that, as someone who was embedded in the action, an artist—even if acting in good faith and making efforts to be objective in representing what happened—is a subject of the action, and as such we can’t rely on his or her descriptions: they may be delusional about the artist, the project, and its relationship with the world.” Helguera therefore suggests that documentation and representation of work should be a “democratic, collaborative process”. (Helguera 2011, p.75). However, he goes on to say that: 

"SEA documentation must be understood and utilized in full recognition of its inadequacy as a surrogate for the actual experience (unless it is meant to be the final product, in which case the work would not be SEA). Documentation of a particular action or activity is usually displayed in a traditional exhibition format, in which it is allowed to narrate the experience. While it may be informative, this approach is frustrating to the gallery visitor, who is exposed to a representation of the experience and not to the experience itself. In this regard, criticisms of SEA as presented in conventional exhibitions are well founded. SEA can’t evoke the immediacy of a collective experience in gallery goers by presenting a video recording of it. (our italics)" 

In a later publication, The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy, and Engagement (2017), which documents and reflects on both their practice, Helguera and Suzanne Lacy each reflect on the subject again, and suggest that documentation and representation are inevitably compromised:

Pablo Helguera: Every time I tried to exhibit the project, which is indeed massive, I confronted issues like how to accurately communicate what that experience was, and what happened. I have decided that the best I can do is to offer the entirety of the documentation, as an archive, to people who may want to explore it, allowing them to draw their own conclusions. (Helguera and Pérez de Miles 2017, p. 31)

Suzanne Lacy: One of the most difficult things to portray in social practice art is experience including that in relation to others. In museum installations, social practice artists deploy a series of tropes (Lacy and Riaño-Alcal, 2017, p. 70).

These commentaries suggest that whilst an artist may have an intention to ensure that their documentation and representation be intersubjective, democratic and collaborative processes, in reality, it was very difficult for them to communicate theactual relational experience of the project in the presentation of the work to other audiences after the fact. This was precisely the motivating impulse of Acts of Transfer.

SEA is of course not on its own in having to negotiate the difficulties of temporality, decentered authorship, and disjointed modes of audience experience at a remove. The discussion around documentation of live and performance art has been active since at least the 1960s (Jones 1997; Berger and Santone 2016; Vella 2021). But in relation to SEA the discussion surrounding documentation has been given much less academic and artistic time and attention, although recent publications such as the edited collection Documents of Socially Engaged Art (2021) have attempted to offer possible approaches. One line of argument runs that SEA or participatory projects shouldn’t be documented at all. The reasons for this are multiple: to document might be seen as commodifying and objectifying the work in ways that run counter to its anti-capitalist spirit, but for some artists it is an ethical decision such as for We are Here, who have often avoided direct imagery of participants to avoid social exploitation, or for an artist like Beverly Bennett who wants to build a feeling of openness and care that calls for anonymity. But according to a toolkit developed by the research project Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS), “Visible outcomes provide potential partners in other projects, granting agencies and policymakers concrete evidence of successful strategies and other facets of good practice” (Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS) – is an arts-based three-year project (2020–2023). Researchers involved in AMASS put together a list of questions to help artists plan how they will document their work:

● How can documentation become a catalyst for real change?

● Will the planned documentation inspire the confidence of different stakeholders?

● Will documentation communicate the project’s vision clearly to policymakers?

● Which kinds of documents would be able to help policymakers identify priorities in this specific town or environment?

● Will documentation indicate future creative and research possibilities to residents, other stakeholders and members of the art community?

This all feels dangerously close to instrumentalising the relationships that are the materials with which such artworks are made and is a recurring bug bear for artists who work in this way, as Allison Rowe, outlines, “socially engaged artists (like me) and the institutions that host them have a propensity for telling stories about their work that prioritize final events rather than make the complex durational, interactions that constitute the social experience of an artwork visible” (Rowe, 2021, p. 3). If we were to follow AMASS’s lead, the value of SEA’s documentation is in showing “successful strategies” to communicate to stakeholders, cultural agencies, NGOs, change policy and pave the way for more funding. Where is the poetry? Where is the imagination? In the hands of AMASS documentation is in the service of something else, its use value dependent on some later measurable gain – social change, funding and assumed legitimacy. Our research showed that artists often felt pressured to measure and display outcomes in order to get their next paid gig; something that reflects on the precarious nature of surviving as an artist (We Industria, 2023).

So how does this sit with Acts of Transfer? Our approach to working on the project was not at all in this vein. Our desire was to document, imperfectly and uncertainly and messily, the felt process of being a part of our returns and reenactments. To document, in our minds, was not an act of reporting an authentic account of concrete happenings. We wanted to reimagine the idea of documentation, to convey something of how our conversations and experiences of time spent with artists and project-participants felt, by paying attention, being responsive to, reflecting and reflecting on, the coincidences of our experiences at a particular site, at a particular time, with particular people. We would convey something of the multiplicities of our conversations and sometimes the difficulties and awkwardnesses and uncertainties that come with working with people. We would simultaneously reflect on an event that happened in the past as well as in its after-life in the ongoing present moving between past, present and future throughout. We held close Eleanor Antin’s claim that “All description is a form of creation”, untethering ourselves from any requirements to re-present reality in some sort of ‘authentic’ form (if that were possible!) (Antin 1974, p. 20). We participated while reflecting on the terms of our participation. We would reflect on the terms of our participation by reimagining what the terms of participation were then and what they are now. We were interested in the slippages that happen as experiences of artworks are relayed and ‘held’ in words, images, sounds and places, and the relations between participants. We were less interested in verisimilitude and more in evoking a feeling of the effervescence of our experience now and in the future, of an artwork that had taken place in the past. How could we embed what Josephine Machon might call (in relation to immersive theatre) “a lasting ephemerality”? (2016).

Part 2: Towards Effervescent Evocation

But what of the ethics of all this? To make artwork with and about the work of other people is always complicated. We were very aware of our ethical obligations to the artists and the project-participants with whom we worked, while also aware that the project we were embarking on was its own distinct project with a particular focus. How then to capture, or better to evoke, our desires to document a reimagining of an artwork that existed in its own right, without any desire to claim the original artwork as our own? Our approach was to centre the subjective experience of everyone involved in this ‘re-making’ of the original work – the artist, the participant, and us – while trying to avoid falling into the trap of reminiscence. Instead, through our re-enactments, we sought to document the experiential qualities of Acts of Transfer, by overlaying past and present, original and return.

We are here borrowing from non-representational methodologies developed by Nigel Thrift and Phillip Vannini. In the spirit of Vannini we focus on “events”, “relations”, “doings”, "affective responses” in order to untether ourselves from the responsibility to ‘capture’ mimetically ‘what happened’. We knew that a) ‘What happened’ would never be one thing. And b) as Vannini would put it, we wanted to adjust the focus, away from “what happened” and towards “what is happening now and what can happen next” (p. 12). In other words, how could we recalibrate documentation to think about it less as ‘evidence’ of activity and more as a reactivation and reimagining of artworks from the past for now and for the future? We were interested, for example, in the polyvocal, giving a sense of an unreliable Greek chorus of the experience of experiencing while being aware of yourself experiencing. There are various ways we navigated this. In the texts for each chapter, Lloyd was inconsistent and often ambiguous with her dialogue attributions – she used inconsistent pronouns: she was sometimes she and sometimes we; the artists and participants were sometimes you singular, sometimes you plural, sometimes he, she or they. She would use a visual signal such as italics or formatting of the text to indicate that the words spoken weren’t hers. She wasn’t trying to take anyone’s words as her own but wanted to create a confusion that she felt more closely reflected the feeling (as Tim Ingold might say) of being outside and inside of things, watching and participating, being active and passive, responsive and reflective at that the same time (Ingold, 2017).  

In the case of the original artworks to which we were looking back, these were absorbed by the chapters of Acts of Transfer in various ways. The films we produced are punctuated by photographs and stills of images from works made by the artists and participants we worked with. We used a number of devices to help us with this. We mirrored original actions and activities, reenacting, for example, the motif of sitting on a park bench in ‘In the moment that you’re in’. In ‘Be someone completely different’ we used visual layering with multiple exposures of bringing our own imagery as well as photographic documentation of the original work into relation. And we used cutaways of original footage and our own footage in ‘A place of grace’. And in a number of the films we used text overlays to confuse the idea of the reliability of a single narrator so that the sense of the ‘voice’ of the speaker shifts between past and present, allowing us to pivot between the original and the re-made, the scripted and the unscripted. All of this allowed us to hold our own work in a relation, without being beholden, to the artworks to which we turned our attention. It allowed us to communicate the different ways in which we were calibrating our experiences of works that we were not, for the most part, a part of, and to reimagine them anew. 

One result of this approach was to embrace a sense of loss and a resistance to a chronological ordering of time. We knew that much of what we were doing would be ‘untranslatable’, lost in our retelling no matter how hard we try. And so the “not-quite-graspable” (Vannini, 2015, p. 6) became what we attempted to grasp. Evidence of this is all over the work of Acts of Transfer. It appears in the graininess, pixellation and blurriness of our images; in our embrace of fragmentation; in our propensity to look to the ground and to the corners, rather than straight on. We were interested in what gets lost, broken down, and made fuzzy or abstracted through actions of concurrent recall and reimagining. These were our techniques for doing justice to our approaches to thinking about different ways to extract, condense, filter, reconfigure, and relay a combination of information, experiences and social relations.  

Conclusion

Over the past 4 years we have presented Acts of Transfer in various formats and iterations: as part of a talk and reading at Arnolfini (Bristol, UK), as a physical exhibition at Phoenix Art Space (Brighton, UK), as an artist book, as a workshop at Towner gallery (Eastbourne, UK) and as a performance/workshop (Tilburg, The Netherlands). In the spirit of how we have approached the idea of documentation, as discussed here, each time we took opportunities to ‘present’ Acts of Transfer we looked to ensure that these opportunities would be generative rather than repetitive. Each time, we recalibrated what we were doing, identifying new facets, new possibilities, and new implications to the approach we took. Each time we looked at how the relationship between artistic research and practice – between writing and image-making – might hold the traces of a tacit understanding of our experiences as we simultaneously produce, reflect and think again. The process has led to unforeseen reimaginings of ourselves and our practices as artists, writers and researchers. Our collaborations – with each other and with others – have led to a reimagining of what the research process might be, and what research outcomes might look, sound or feel like. It has opened up how relationships between image and text can be harnessed, loosened, and liquified in our attempts to get a little closer to what we’ve come to call an effervescent evocation. Here artworks of the past are in a process of constant reimagining; they no longer exist as they were then but as they are now, in a state of volatile fizzing and frothing for now and for the future.