ABSTRACT
Documentation is the process of gathering and organizing information about a work, including its condition, its content, its context, and the actions taken to preserve it. For the writing of art history one used to be able to rely on the art objects. When artworks become prone to obsolescence or are only meant to exist for a short period, documentation is the only thing people can fall back on. The traditional documentation strategy for the conservation of art is focused on describing the object, in the best objective way possible. But conservation as a practice is not as fixed as one might assume, and hence documentation strategies tend to vary a lot. Needless to say, like any other form of representation, documentation will always be arbitrary and incomplete in relation to the artwork. By analyzing the documentation practice of the performance group Blast Theory, I will argue in the first part of this chapter that documents (such as texts, videos, still images, instructions, etc.) can sometimes communicate more about a work and how it is experienced than its physical manifestation can.
